nlJt 


MARLES  FERfiUJ 


pf<jj^ 


LIBRARY 

OF  THK 

University  of  California. 


oiK'r  OF 


Rec."U^e.eW U'<^. 

^Accession       91211  Cl(us        ^^A^rv 

ZI^HJX2 

366 


BY    THE    SAME    AUTHOR 
"A  Great  Book  of  a  Great  Epoch" 

EDWIN  MABKHAM  says :  ''It  has  style,  insight,  high  seri- 
ousness, spiritual  passion.  It  is  a  great  book  of  a  great  epochs 

JULIAN  HA  WTHORNE  says :  ''He  is  a  voice  speaking  unfa- 
miliar  things,  with  good  emphasis  and  discretion.'''' 

CHARLES  H.  PARKHUBST,  D.D.,  says:  "An  interesting, 
stimulating,  startling,  and,  all  in  all,  wonderful  book.'''' 

THE    RELIGION 
OF  DEMOCRACY 

A  Memorandum  of  Modern  Principles 

Rev.  Philip  Moxom,  D.D.:  "  It  is  great  in  that  it  clearly 
belongs,  as  do  few  books  in  a  century,  to  the  prophetic  literature 
of  the  world." 

Geoi'ge  Hodges,  D.D.,  Dean  Episcopal  Theol.  School,  Cam- 
bridge, Mass. :  "It  differs  from  the  current  sociology  as  Carlyle's 
French  Revolution  differs  from  the  history  of  the  schools.  .  .  . 
The  reader  never  fails  to  be  stimulated  and  strengthened." 

Ella  Wheeler  "WUcox:  "It  is  a  clarion  call  to  a  higher  civili- 
zation." 

Boston  Transcript:  "Probes  as  deep  as  Carlyle,  and  smitcfl 
with  the  strength  of  Rnskin.  .  .  ." 

The  Sun,  Baltimore:  "There  is  strength  in  this  book— the 
strength  of  a  crusader  who  strikes  boldly  and  goes  straight  to 
the  point." 

T.  T.  Hunger,  D.D.:  "A  brilliant,  searching  book,  that 
reminds  one  of  '  Sartor  Resartus.'  " 

12mo,  Cloth.    Price,  $1.00.    Post-paid 


FUNK    &  WAGNALLS    COMPANY,  Pub'rs 

30  Lafayette  Place,  New  York 


THE 

AFFIRMATIVE 

INTELLECT 

An  Account  of  the  Origin  and 
Mission  of  the  American  Spirit 


BY 

CHARLES  FERGUSON 

Author  of  *'The  Religion  of  Democracy' 


FUNK   &  WAGNAI,!^   COMPANY 

NKW    YORK    AND    I.ONDON 
1901 


^_. 


hj/ 


^3f%    COPTWOHT,   19OI,  BY 

CHARIvES  FERGUSON 

Registered  at  Stationer's  Hall,  London,  England 

[Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America] 

Published  September,  1901 


CONTENTS 


PAOK 

Preface 5 

Introduction 7 

CHAPTER  I 
The  Secret  of  Evolutionary  Progress     .     .     15 

CHAPTER  II 
The  Superstition  of  Arbitrary  I^aw  ...     30 

CHAPTER  III 
The  Two  Opposite  Sanctions  of  Social  Order     42 

CHAPTER  IV 
The  Revolutionary  Church-idea    ....     61 

CHAPTER  V 
The  Positive  Organization  of  Society     .     .     79 

CHAPTER  VI 
The  Axioms  of  the  Affirmative  Intelledl   .   113 

CHAPTER  VII 

The  Working-out  of  the  World  Problem  .   150 

8 


91211 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Arciiive 

in  2007  witii  funding  from 

IVIicrosoft  Corporation 


littp://www.archive.org/details/affirmativeintelOOfergrich 


The  shout  of  the  battle  dies  away.  We 
are  tired  of  the  heroism  of  crowds.  One 
crowd  is  no  better  than  another  crowd, 
and  never  was  better.  The  only  avail- 
ing viSlories  are  those  that  07ie  man 
wins  against  the  mob. 
Every  man^s  body  is  environed  with  a 
sacred  precin5l;  and  every  fine,  free  life 
is  a  challenge  to  all  the  world.  To  be 
a  friend  to  another  is  to  defy  him.  And 
it  is  death  to  surrender  to  a  friend — 
fataler  than  to  any  enemy. 
The  greatest  man  is  the  Man  that  is 
nearest — and  farthest  away.  My  arm. 
is  around  His  neck,  yet  I  have  never 
touched  Him,  and  dare  not.  He  has 
broken  bread  with  me  familiarly,  and  I 
have  been  filled  with  awe,  as  if  I  had 
seen  God, 


INTRODUCTION 


The  real  battles  of  history — those  that  have 
issues — are  those  waged  between  the  men  of 
affirmative  and  creative  intellect  on  one  side  and 
the  men  of  negative  and  passive  intellecft  on 
the  other.  The  creative  intelledl  is  that  which""" 
is  dominated  by  the  ideal — never  for  a  moment 
abandoning  the  heart's  desire  and  the  inner  law 
of  humanity.  The  passive  intellecft  is  that  which 
is  cowed  by  the  appearance  of  things  and  pros- 
trated to  an  external  law.  On  both  sides  there 
are  those  called  a  priorists  and  those  called  a 
posteriorists — on  both  sides  men  of  letters,  men 
of  science,  and  men  of  affairs. 

On  the  side  of  the  creative  intelledl  there  are"^ 
craftsmen,  and  there  are  men  who  spend  their  I 
lives  over  microscopes  and  in  laboratories,  side  | 
by  side  with  the  makers  of  statues  and  sermons.  I 
And  on  the  side  of  the  negative  intelledl  may  be  '^ 
found  theologians  who  postpone  to  a  book  the  I 
7 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

authority  of  their  own  souls,  listed  in  common 
cause  with  biologists  who  would  govern  society 
by  the  motions  of  badleria,  and  statesmen  who 
would  buy  an  archipelago  and  slay  a  nation  for 
the  sake  of  the  sancflities  of  property  law. 

The  "original  sin"  of  the  world  is,  as  we 
have  been  told,  the  rejedlion  of  the  human  ideal 
and  the  going  in  search  of  a  non-human  law  of 
good  and  evil.  The  world's  redemption  is  in  the 
Man  who  is  utterly  true  to  his  humanity — in 
whom  it  is  discovered  that  in  the  depths  of  a  man 
are  real  freedom  and  creative  power.  So  it  may 
be  said  of  the  poet,  the  artist,  the  man  of  science 
— any  one  who  lives  and  works  in  the  strength 
of  the  creative  mind — he  is  begotten,  not  made; 
he  is  not  of  the  substance  of  the  creation,  but  of 
the  Creator. 

The  history  of  the  world  is  a  struggle — on  the 
whole  a  successful  struggle — of  the  creative  intel- 
ledl  against  the  terror  and  the  discouragement  of 
the  external  law.  It  is  the  progressive  endeavor 
of  the  human  spirit  to  make  itself  at  home  in  the 
universe,  and  to  fashion  the  stubborn  things  of 
Nature  according  to  the  uses  of  the  soul. 
8 


Introduction 

The  central  drama  of  history  is  Christianity, 
which  is  in  its  broadest  aspedl  simply  the  attempt 
to  supersede  the  old  world  social  order,  governed 
by  an  external  authority  and  the  prepossessions 
of  the  passive  intellect,  by  a  new  world-order 
governed  by  an  internal  authority — the  faith  of 
the  affirmative  spirit. 

The  meaning  and  use  of  the  historic  Church  is 
that  it  has  served  as  a  mighty  causeway  between 
the  old  order  and  the  new — between  theocracy 
and  democracy.  It  belongs  to  both  the  old  and 
the  new.  For  a  thousand  years  it  gestated  the 
soul  of  the  West  in  the  womb  of  the  East.  The 
very  nature  of  the  Church,  in  its  medieval 
constitution,  was  contradidlion;  it  could  not 
otherwise  have  done  its  work.  Every  dog^a  of 
the  Church  was  a  proclamation  of  liberty  framed 
in  the  language  of  slaves.  Every  sacrament  was 
a  pledge  of  equality,  making  its  difficult  appeal 
in  the  acceptable  symbols  of  privilege  and  caste. 

The  inner  logic  of  the  Church's  great  system 
of  administration  was  not  the  permanent  separa- 
tion of  the  sacred  from  the  secular,  but  the  win- 
ning of  a  new  polarity  of  social  organization. 
9 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

The  social  ideal  of  the  modem  world  was  bom 
out  of  the  bosom  of  the  Church.  Americanism 
is  the  evolutionary  produdt  of  historic  Catholi- 
cism; for  the  quintessence  of  the  old  Catholicism 
was  simply  the  attempt  to  estabHsh  a  great 
social  order,  not  by  external  authority  and  the 
compromise  of  interests,  as  in  the  * '  kingdoms  of 
the  world, ' '  but  through  the  purification  and  the 
concurrence  of  wills. 

In  the  last  analysis  there  are  but  these  two 
possible  forms  of  social  order — there  are  these 
two  opposite  and  contradicflory  conceptions  of 
the  sandlion  of  social  law.  The  sanc5lion,  the 
force  of  the  law,  is  either  outside  of  mankind  or 
it  is  within.  Either  it  is  in  the  nature-of- things 
and  the  arbitrary  will  of  God,  or  else  it  is  the 
wiU  of  the  people — the  heart's  desire  of  humanity. 

The  idea  that  the  will  of  the  people  could  be 
the  source  of  social  law  was  born  into  the  world 
with  great  travail.  It  was  for  ages  difficult,  even 
impossible,  to  conceive  such  an  idea.  The  wills 
of  the  people  seemed  so  shallow  and  weak,  or  else 
so  irrational  and  contradictory.  But  Christianity 
is  the  discovery  of  the  infinite  depth  of  the  human 
10 


Introduction 

will.  And  so  for  nearly  two  thousand  years  it 
has  been  possible  to  imagine  that  a  multitude  of 
men — the  controlling  element  of  a  population — 
might  be  brought  to  desire  and  to  will  with  steady 
insistence  things  that  are  beautiful  and  j  ust .  The 
Church  of  the  Middle  Ages  stood  as  a  provisional 
plan  of  such  a  social  system.  In  the  midst  of  a 
world-order  based  upon  an  opposite  principle — 
the  principle  of  the  external  law — the  Church 
wrought  into  concrete  forms  and  the  solid  struc- 
ture of  institutions  the  democratic  ideal.  It  was 
a  marvelous  achievement — this  magnificent  rough- 
sketching  of  a  new  world  in  the  oppugnant 
materials  of  the  old. 

In  the  sixteenth  century  the  idea  of  the  social 
law  as  proceeding  from  the  sanified  and  consen- 
taneous wills  of  the  people  was  fairly  born  into 
the  secular  world.  The  Church  had  poured  its 
vital  store  into  the  lap  of  the  nations.  It  had 
breathed  out  its  very  soul  of  liberty  in  the  breath 
of  the  modern  spirit.  And  for  four  hundred 
years  democracy  has  wrestled  for  the  spiritual 
order — for  the  sovereignty  of  the  human  ideal — 
in  the  open  arena  of  the  secular  world.  The 
11 


aA/ 


The  Affirmative   Intellect 

issue  has  commonly  found  a  statement  in  terms 
of  politics  and  the  forms  of  government,  but  that 
is  superficial.  The  issue  reaches  to  the  intimacies 
of  life;  it  is  revolutionary  in  the  spheres  of  morals, 
law,  art,  science,  and  economics. 

Despite  the  political  forms  of  democracy,  more 
or  less  espoused  by  every  nation  in  Europe,  the 
trembling  scale  has  nowhere  in  the  world  fairly 
turned  against  the  old  regime  save  in  one  country 
— the  United  States  of  America.  In  England 
the  scale  balances  in  an  unstable  equilibrium, 
but  with  a  marked  tendency  toward  readlion 
and  a  return  to  the  past.  In  every  other  country 
of  Europe  the  social  center  of  gravity  still  rests 
unmistakably  in  the  old  order. 

Everywhere  a  state-supported  Church  stands 
as  the  symbol  of  the  unbroken  sway  of  dogma — 
the  preponderance  of  the  passive  intellec5l,  the 
rule  of  a  non-human  and  external  law.  America 
stands  alone  for  the  Church-supported  state — a 
faith-supported  commonwealth.  We  have  openly 
discredited  here  every  semblance  of  external 
authority,  and  have  removed  all  the  symbols  of 
dogma  from  the  forum  of  our  common  life. 
12 


Introduction 

If  there  be  only  a  God  of  Sinai  and  no  God  of 
the  Soul  of  Man,  certainly  we  are  in  a  way  to 
find  it  out  with  cost — for  we  have  rested  the 
stupendous  weight  of  a  vast  social  system  upon 
the  possibility  that  a  controlling  majority,  or 
minority,  here  will  wish  for  what  is  fine  and  will 
a  law  that  is  fair. 

The  law  of  America  is  not  static,  but  vital.  It 
rests  upon  no  tradition,  no  code,  no  perfedled 
system;  it  undertakes  to  win  and  dominate  the 
world  by  the  sheer  kinetic  reasonableness  of  the 
creative  intelledl. 

America — standing  alone  among  the  nations  in 
the  morning  of  the  last  cycle  of  two  millenniums — 
girds  herself  to  the  fulfilling  of  the  ancient  faith. 


18 


The    Affirmative    Intelled: 


CHAPTER  I 

THE  SECRET  OF  EVOLUTIONARY  PROGRESS 

I.  Considering  our  modern  faith  in  the  unity 
of  the  world,  it  would  seem  reasonable  to  suppose 
that  the  secret  of  the  success  of  nations  is  closely 
related  to  that  of  the  success  of  individuals,  and, 
in  turn,  it  would  seem  that  the  answer  to  the 
question,  What  is  the  greatness  of  great  men  ? 
should  contain  the  answer  to  a  certain  other  ques- 
tion which  has  staggered  all  the  biologists  up  to 
this  time — the  question,  namely,  of  the  motive 
force  of  progress  in  organic  evolution,  What  is  it 
that  makes  life  go  forward  ? 

The  evolutionary  experts  have,  to  speak  gen- 
erally, established  nothing  but  the  broad  proposi- 
tion that  all  kinds  of  life,  from  the  lowest  to  the 
highest,  are  somehow  related  by  heredity.  It  is 
satisf  adlorily  shown  that  altho  man  may  not  have 
sprung  from  the  monkey,  yet  the  two  have, 
15 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

somewhere  in  the  beginnings  of  life,  a  common 
ancestry. 

At  this  jun<5lure  the  scientists  have  abandoned 
us  to  our  relations,  without  giving  us  any  sug- 
gestions for  proving  our  own  prestige.  They 
have  discovered  no  principle  of  progress — no 
justification  of  the  claim  for  an  upward  and  for- 
ward tendency  in  evolution.  For  all  that  they 
have  shown  us  to  the  contrary,  we  are  bound  to 
conceive  of  life  as  flowing  in  an  accidental,  inde- 
terminate way,  or  swirling  in  meaningless  cycles. 
We  ask.  How  can  the  stream  rise  higher  than  its 
source  ?  how  can  the  less  produce  the  greater  ? 
And  there  is  no  answer.  The  men  of  science 
have  completely  failed  to  show  how  it  is  that  life 
can  mount  and  meliorate.  They  have  found  out 
nothing  of  the  energy  and  spring,  the  push  and 
go  of  evolution. 

Darwin's  natural-seledlion  theory  is  now  greatly 
discredited  by  the  experts,  and  as  an  explana- 
tion of  progress  it  was  inadequate  at  best.  I^a- 
marck  came  near  making  a  good  guess,  but  his 
followers  have  broken  up  into  rival  camps  and 
have  not  brought  his  suggestion  to  any  effedlual 
16 


The  Secret  of  Progress 

issue.  There  have  been  a  good  many  other 
speculators,  but  scarcely  two  of  them  have 
agreed. 

All  that  the  evolutionists  have  told  us,  there- 
fore, about  the  life-process  is  very  interesting, 
but  it  is  not  yet  important.  It  does  not  teach  us 
anything  about  the  way  of  success,  and  it  pro- 
poses no  escape  from  the  fearful  round  of  human 
failure — we  can  not  use  it  for  the  solution  of  the 
prac5lical  problems  of  human  life. 

II.  There  is  an  honored  Socratic  maxim  that 
man  himself  is  the  measure  of  all  things,  and  an 
Aristotelian  one  that  the  real  nature  of  a  growing 
thing  is  to  be  discovered  only  in  its  matured 
charac5ler. 

Following  these  intimations,  let  us,  in  a  tenta- 
tive way,  set  down  the  formula  of  a  scientific 
method  which  may  afford  us  a  key  to  the  secret 
of  the  motive  force  of  evolution,  and  to  a  good 
many  other  mysteries  that  remain  to  be  explained. 
Find  the  deepest  thing  in  the  most  representative 
person  and  you  will  have  found  the  deepest  thing 
in  the  protozoort,. 

17 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

It  is  time  to  give  up  trying  to  probe  the  nature 

of  a  man  by  looking  hard  at  an  amceba.     I^et  us 

reverse  the  scientific  process,  and  attempt  rather 

to  explain  the  lowest  reaches  of  life  by  studying 

the  inmost  and  simplest  principle  of  humanity. 

For,  try  as  he  might,  no  man  ever  did  succeed 

\J     in  divesting  himself  of  his  own  soul,  no  one  ever 

i     did  or  can  escape  from  the  human  point  of  view 

\     or  regard  things  from  the  thing-standpoint.   Our 

science  has  in  this  regard  suffered  a  delusion. 

III.  Now  the  principle  of  success  in  represent- 
ative persons  is,  we  may  venture  to  affirm,  a 
certain  elemental  faith  or  world-gripping  self- 
persistence.  The  most  superb  and  human  man 
is  the  one  that  likes  and  roots  himself  in  the 
widest  range  of  real  things.  To  feel  solidly  at 
home  in  the  world  of  death,  labor,  and  accidents, 
to  find  one's  self  in  the  whole  constitution  of  it, 
to  have  the  widest  and  deepest  interests  without 
capitulation  or  the  sacrifice  of  one's  one  nature — 
that  is  to  be  representatively,  redoubtably  human. 

All  life — so  far  as  we  know  or  can  know — 
exists  in  and  through  a  very  real  and  insistent 
18 


The  Secret  of  Progress 

relation  to  its  environment.  And  to  say  that 
this  relation  is  the  sine  qua  no7i  of  life  is  to  say 
what  is  true,  but  it  misses  the  principal  point ; 
that  point  is  that  the  internal  law  of  the  organ- 
ism must  dominate  the  law  of  the  environment. 
Certainly  the  living  thing  must  keep  up  a  cordial 
correspondence  with  the  world  around  it,  but  the 
critical  question  remains,  the  question  of  Ufe  or 
death — to  wit :  Shall  the  organism  assimilate  the 
world  to  itself,  or  shall  it  assimilate  itself  to  the 
world?  In  the  one  case  there  is  growth  and 
strength,  in  the  other  decline  and  dissolution. 

What  appears  thus  to  be  true  in  the  lower 
regions  of  life  we  can  feel  and  know  to  be  true 
in  the  region  of  humanity.  A  man  gains  morally 
as  he  gains  physically  by  assimilating  the  elements 
of  the  external  world  in  the  way  of  his  own  con- 
stitution. He  must  not,  on  pain  of  mental  dis- 
tradlion  and  moral  decay,  vacate  his  own  ideal  or 
give  up  his  own  desire.  His  health  and  sanity 
depend  upon  his  wrestling  confidently  with  the 
world  for  the  things  that  he  really  cares  about. 

Absolute  excellence  for  a  man  would  be  the 
facing  of  the  innumerable  diflScult  choices  of  life 
19 


A  A 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

— its  contradidlions,  restraints,  defeats — without 
once  lapsing  into  self-pity  or  self-praise,  and  with- 
out once  meditating  a  sacrifice  of  his  human  nature 
or  questioning  the  validity  and  legitimacy  of  the 
elemental  passion  of  his  heart.  It  is  an  approxi- 
mation to  this  excellence  that  characfterizes  the 
first-rate  men  of  history  and  the  heroes  of  scrip- 
ture and  romance.  Absolute  excellence  is  inex- 
tinguishable faith,  and  relative  excellence  is  the 
maintaining  of  the  widest  and  deepest  possible 
relationships  to  the  world  with  the  fewest  and 
least  considerable  capitulations. 

Now  the  point  here  is  that  this  quintessential 
faith  —  this  confident  embrace  of  the  external 
world — is  the  principle  of  advance  and  success  in 
all  life  from  the  mollusk  to  the  son  of  man  ;  and 
that,  with  due  abatement  of  the  intension  of 
words,  it  is  true  to  say  that  organisms  of  the 
very  lowest  order  survive  and  prevail  according 
to  their  self -loyalty  and  venturesomeness  of  faith. 
They  make  effedlual  connedlion  with  their  envi- 
ronment when  they  have  some  degree  of  self- 
persistence  in  spite  of  difficulty — some  pluck  and 
potency  of  will,  some  inner  energy  of  faith  to 
30 


The  Secret  of  Progress 

subdue  the  nature  of  the  external  world  to  that 
of  their  own  lives. 

Progress  is  in  the  spontaneous  adventure  of 
the  living  thing  to  assimilate  to  its  own  nature 
new  and  unprecedented  circumstances — to  find 
itself  and  make  itself  at  home  in  a  wider  world. 
The  spring  is  not  in  the  will  of  an  arbitrary  and 
transcendent  Providence,  not  in  the  force 
cumstances,  and  not  in  fixed  laws  and  resident 
forces.  It  is  a  principle  of  self-origination.  It 
operates  with  an  energy  derived  firom  a  sphere 
superior  to  that  of  natural  sequence  and  mechani- 
cal causation.  It  is  creative  rather  than  crea- 
turely,  and  even  in  its  lowest  expressions  it  may 
be  regarded  as  the  embryonic  representative  of 
the  free  and  creative  spirit  of  man. 

So  it  becomes  possible  to  say  of  all  life  in  its 
progressive  and  vidlorious  aspects  that  it  is  begot- 
ten, not  made — that  it  is  of  the  substance  of  the 
Creator  rather  than  of  the  creation. 

To  be  sure,  nobody  knows,  or  can  know  by 

black-board  demonstration,  that  the  foregoing  is 

the  final  truth  of  the  matter ;  but  it  affords  an 

hypothesis  that  has  the  advantage  of  explain- 

31 


-sidenF  |  j/v 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

ing  the  facfts.  And  we  must  come  to  understand 
that  valid  science  is  not  so  much  charadlerized  by 
the  conclusiveness  of  its  proofs  as  by  the  pradlica- 
bility  of  its  assumptions. 

IV.  We  are  told  that  all  organisms  are  related 
by  heredity;  and  what  is  heredity?  What  is  it 
but  the  night-side  of  life — the  negative  of  which 
life  itself  is  the  affirmative  ?  It  is  the  principle 
in  biology  that  corresponds  to  the  mechanical 
principle  of  inertia.  Its  essence  is  that  it  does 
nothing,  works  no  changes.  It  is  a  fact,  but  it 
is  not  a  force. 

On  the  other  hand,  change  is  the  very  defini- 
tion of  life.  The  distinguishing  note  of  an 
organism  as  marked  off  from  the  inorganic  world 
is  that  it  has  in  its  own  body  a  law  of  perpetual 
change.  Heredity  is  the  name  given  to  the 
limited  and  temporary  persistence  of  the  things 
that  life  achieves.  But  life  itself  has  always  had 
a  career  outside  of  and  beyond  its  past  achieve- 
ments. Over  the  realm  of  nature  there  has 
always  brooded  a  realm  of  creative  causes ;  and 
it  is  in  the  creative  realm,  and  not  in  the  realm 


The  Secret  of  Progress 

that  is  natural  and  created,  that  the  progressive 
career  of  evolution  is  running  its  course.  E very- 
living  thing  has  some  sort  of  access  to  an  ever- 
present  store  of  original  powers. 

There  is  in  a  sapling  tree  a  latency  of  enter- 
prise, and  real  incalculable  history  in  the  wheel- 
ing wing  of  a  hawk. 

The  chance  of  making  a^ark  Jn_tlie_.world —    | 
for~a~Bat  or  a  bee — depends  not  upon  his  circum- 
stances or  any  decree  of  destiny,  but  upon  his 
trust  in  the  inner  and  upper  powers — his  draft 
upon  the  infinite. 

Of  course  no  bat  and  no  bee  ever  did  make 
much  of  a  mark  in  the  world.  The  pathos  of 
the  living  universe  is  its  inexhaustible  stupidity 
and  cowardice. 

The  constant  tendency  of  all  living  things  has 
been  to  settle  back  upon  the  precedents,  and  to 
rely  upon  a  failing  heredity  and  a  mere  habit  or 
reflex  adlion.  The  bathos  and  degeneration  of 
life,  its  bestial  ugliness,  its  physical  goiters  and 
contortions,  are  due  to  its  faithless  denial  of  its 
own  desire — its  low  subserviency  to  circum- 
stance. 

28 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

V.  The  central  interest  of  the  world-process 
is  the  economy  of  this  spontaneity  of  life,  and  the 
quickening  and  deepening  of  it  into  the  serenity 
and  gaiety  of  heart  of  high-spirited  men.  In  the 
beginning  the  force  of  circumstances  is  nearly 
everything,  and  the  spontaneity  of  life  is  nothing 
or  next  to  nothing.  But  when  the  consummation 
is  reached  in  a  free  and  enterprising  humanity 
the  conditions  are  reversed — life  becomes  nearly 
everything,  and  circumstances  nothing  or  next  to 
nothing.  Evolution  is  revolutionary.  It  moves 
forward  by  coups  de  main  and  conquest.  It  is 
the  progressive  supersession  of  the  rule  of  seem- 
ingly fixed  and  static  laws  by  the  rule  of  an 
incalculable  freedom.  Mechanical  force  —  the 
tyranny  of  the  irrational  elements  of~hatUfe — 
gives  way  to  vital  force,  the  energy  of  creative 
life.  In  the  lower  reaches  of  the  process,  as 
compared  with  the  higher,  heredity  is  relatively 
strong.  It  is  likely  enough  that  characfteristics 
acquired  in  the  lifetime  of  the  individual  are,  in 
the  lower  orders,  transmitted  by  heredity,  but  in 
higher  life  this  seems  generally  not  to  be  the 
case.  Heredity  is  seen  to  be  a  failing  thing,  and 
24 


The  Secret  of  Progress 

the  privileges  that  depend  upon  it  are,  with  the 
advancement  of  the  world,  ever  shorter  and 
shorter  lived.  The  competencies  that  avail  in 
the  highest  circles  can  not  in  any  considerable 
measure  be  passed  on  from  generation  to  genera- 
tion, but  must  be  won  out  of  the  infinite  by  each 
individual  for  himself.  In  all  that  is  great  and 
prevailing  an  organism  is  born  not  of  the  flesh. 

VI.  The  teleology  of  the  life-process  —  its 
general  aim  and  purport — is  thus  apparent 
enough.  One  can  not  contemplate  the  march  of 
life  from  its  status  of  creaturehood  almost  utterly 
subjedl  to  the  law  of  its  environment,  to  the 
status  of  free  creatorship,  pressing  upon  the 
breast  of  nature  the  image  of  a  supra-natural 
ideal — without  feeling  that  he  is  witnessing  the 
unfoldment  of  a  spiritual  drama. 

It  is  as  if  the  desire  of  God  had  been  from  the 
beginning  that  he  might  escape  from  his  abso- 
luteness. He  has  been  resolute  to  limit  and  share 
his  liberty.  It  would  seem  that  he  has  cared 
above  everything  that  he  should  not  be  all  in  all, 
but  that  life  might  come  into  the  world  that 
25 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

should  look  him  tmshrinkingly  in  the  face  and 
demand  of  him  all  that  is  reasonable  and  good. 

It  is  unthinkable  that  God  should  create  a  free 
soul ;  the  soul  must  be  begotten  and  bom  ;  it  can 
not  be  made.  Neither  can  freedom  be  given  as  a 
gratuity — it  can  not  exist  in  virtue  of  any  charter 
or  franchise.  And  the  liberty  of  a  reasonable 
man  must  be  as  deep  as  the  liberty  of  God — a 
kind  of  participation  in  the  creative  responsibil- 
ity— or  else  it  is  a  fantastical  illusion.        "' 

iDoubtless  God  could  have  gotten  himself  a 
man  in  a  moment  of  time  and  with  little  trouble 
if  it  had  been  merely  a  matter  of  executing  his 
own  laws  and  diredling  his  own  forces. 

It  took  time  and  trouble — immeasurable  eons 
of  time  and  trouble — because  he  had  to  wait  for 
the  little  living  thing  to  move  of  its  own  motion 
to  the  exploitation  of  the  universe.  And  he 
had  to  suffer  meanwhile  all  the  caricatures  and 
contradidlions  of  life  that  come  of  the  wayward- 
ness and  fatuity  of  the  stumbling,  groping,  in- 
choate will.  The  difficulty  of  God  in  bringing  a 
man  to  birth  has  been  the  stubborn,  primordial 
inertia  of  all  living  things — a  kind  of  sag  and 
26 


The  Secret  of  Progress 

gravitation  back  to  mere  mechanism,  passivity, 
and  poor  creaturehood,  a  besotment  of  toryism 
and  orthodoxy  that  reaches  to  the  very  grubs — 
always  infidel  at  heart,  and  refusing  to  risk  their 
lives  in  the  current  of  the  passing  day. 

One  must  not  venture,  then,  to  say  that  God 
has  ever  quenched  the  heart's  desire,  the  quick- 
ening will,  of  any  living  thing.  On  the  contrary, 
it  would  seem  that  he  has  nursed  and  fanned 
that  little  flame  with  stupendous  patience  for  a 
billion  years,  as  if  it  were  his  inmost  wish  that 
life  should  want  something  of  him  and  make 
importunate  demands. 

So  the  legitimate  lord  of  the  world  is  the 
Heart's  Desire  of  Humanity.  The  world  is  not 
to  be  governed  by  rapt  consideration  of  what 
the  soul  ought  to  want,  but  by  buoyant  and  ven- 
turesome struggle  for  the  things  that  it  really 
does  want  in  the  red  heart  and  center  of  it. 

VII.  The  novum  organum  here  proposed — to 
wit,  the  scientific  method  which  undertakes  to 
find  in  the  nature  of  man  its  hypotheses  for  the 
interpretation  of  the  nature  of  the  non-human 

27 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

world — is,  after  all,  very  old.  The  simple  truth 
is  that  in  the  last  accounting  no  other  method  is 
possible. 

It  is  found  upon  examination  of  history  that 
scientific  theories  of  the  universe  are  invariably 
corresponsive  with  prevailing  ethical  theories  of 
the  nature  of  man.  The  mind  can  never  escape 
from  its  own  shadow — and  light — but,  spite  of 
all  premeditation,  it  always  has  written  and 
ddtibtless  always  will  write  the  theories  of  science 
in  the  charadlers  of  conscience.  There  must  be 
virile  ethics  before  there  can  be  sound  physics. 
Our  biologists  have  cut  the  heart  out  of  organ- 
isms, and  treated  life  as  if  it  Were  dough,  because 
they  are  still  under  the  spell  of  the  soul-contem- 
ning theological  habit.  They  owe  their  fespedlful 
acknowledgments  to  the  clergy.  If  they  were  not 
so  firmly  persuaded  that  the  right  moral  rule  of 
human  life  is  to  be  found  in  an  external  law, 
they  would  not  have  gone  to  their  biological 
investigations  with  so  stubbornly  fixed  a  prepos 

i  session  that  the  rule  and  explanation  of  all  life 

J  ...... 

is  to  be  looked,  for  in  its  environment.  A  mental 
habit  does  not  necessarily  change  with  a  change 


The  Secret  of  Progress 

of  opinions.  The  fathers  worship  an  infallible 
book,  and  the  children  the  invincible  nature-of- 
things ;  but  it  is  all  one  and  the  same.  Both 
refuse  to  see  that  life  itself  is  original  and  an 
authority. 

Modern  scientific  theory  is  morally  patholog- 
ical ;  it  is  low-spirited.  It  breathes  the  atmosphere 
of  the  failure  and  discouragement  of  the  French 
Revolution.  It  could  not  possibly  have  grown 
up  within  the  tonic  range  of  Goethe  and  Diderot, 
or  within  sound  of  the  song  of  Wordsworth, 
Coleridge,  and  Shelley. 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 


CHAPTER  II 

THK  SUPERSTITION   OF  ARBITRARY  I,AW 

I.  If  one  would  go  to  the  root  of  the  law  of 
the  social  constitution,  one  must  examine  the 
idea  of  natural  law;  for  human  society  has  never 
defied  jthe  natural  universe,  but,  on  the  contrary, 
has  always  shaped  its  ordinances  in  conformity 
with  what  it  has  supposed  to  be  the  fadl  of 
nature.  Nature  has  ever  been  big  and  over- 
whelming, and  the  social  state  has  from  the 
beginning  lain  little  in  the  hollow  of  her  hand. 

II.  Over  against  Nature  stands  the  Man,  and 
deep  in  his  heart  is  the  passion  for  liberty.  For  the 
passion  for  liberty  is  only  another  name  for  life 
itself.  lyiberty  is  a  word  of  much  sophistication, 
but  it  means,  when  it  means  anything,  oppor- 
tunity to  live  one's  own  life  in  one's  own  way. 

Now,  as  intelligence  brightens  into  intelledl  it 
would  seem  that  a  moment  arrives  when  con- 


Arbitrary  Law 

sciousness  separates  itself  from  the  mere  engross- 
ment of  passing  experience,  and  refledlion  be- 
comes possible.  The  man  looks  before  and  after, 
considers  his  disappointment  of  yesterday,  his 
fear  of  to-morrow.  He  thinks,  and  the  thought 
rises  in  his  heart :  * '  This  nature-of-things  which 
is  so  overwhelming  in  power,  is  it  not  also  over- 
bearing in  disposition?  Can  I  trust  it  farther 
and  continue  on  my  way,  or  would  it  not  be  safer 
to  postpone  my  living  for  a  while  and  sit  down 
here  to  study  out  the  law?" 

The  temptation  is  to  cut  the  intellecfl  loose 
from  the  heart  of  life  and  to  live  without  risks. 
The  man  longs  for  a  sure  rule,  an  unquestionable 
definition  of  good  and  evil. 

And  so,  in  fine,  he  rejedts  what  is  interesting 
for  what  is  authoritative.  He  sets  out  to  follow 
after  the  things  that  he  does  not  care  for  and  to 
discover  a  truth  that  is  more  true  than  life  itself. 
And  after  many  ages  and  across  world-tyrannies 
and  the  convulsions  of  nations  he  returns  with  a 
harvest  of  pedantries  and  prurient  lusts. 

The  original  sin  of  the  world  is  not  contempt 
for  arbitrary  laws,  but  respe(5l  for  them.  It  is 
31 


k 


4^ 


«WAfl 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

the  refusal  to  believe  that  nature  is  plastic  to  the 
ideal.  It  is  the  abje<5l  worship  of  the  laws  of 
creation,  and  the  subjedlion  of  the  creative  soul 
to  the  authority  of  Things. 

The  process  of  spiritual  redemption  is  a  tonic- 
ing  of  the  will  with  faith  until  it  shall  dare 
believe  in  its  own  desire,  and  be  reasstured  of  the 
authenticity  of  the  ideal.  The  soul  is  taught  to 
turn  away  from  the  bullying  idols,  to  reject  the 
evident  gods  that  order  us  around,  and  to  serve 
only  the  unseen  God  who  backs  us  up. 

This  is  not  disdain  of  Nature,  but  the  opposite 
of  that.  It  is  the  embrace  of  Nature — man- 
fashion — ^with  an  imperious  tenderness  that  falls 
in  love  with  all  her  ways,  but  will  not  suffer  her 
to  didlate. 


III.  Since  the  beginning  the  human  mind  has 
labored  under  the  delusion  that  there  exists,  deep- 
3  bedded  in  the  nature  of  things,  a  reverend  and 
^  f'K  I   authoritative  law  that  stands  in  its  own  right  and 
'     '    without  any  relation  to  human  nature.     It  has 
been  supposed  that  this  law  is  the  absolute,  capi- 
tal truth;  that  it  is  capable  of  being  elicited  in 


Arbitrary  Law 

one  way  or  another — by  gratuitous  deliverances 
from  Sinai,  by  vigils  and  prayers,  by  the  diligent 
exercise  of  microscopes  and  specflroscopes;  and 
that,  once  got,  it  can  be  done  up  in  solid  and  im- 
perishable propositions  with  which  to  rule  the 
world — in  chastened  and  martyred  disregard  of 
what  a  man  cares  for. 

It  seems  that  this  is  the  chief  of  superstitions — 
the  great  apostacy.  It  is  the  reje(5lion  of  that 
principle  of  faith,  that  confident  embrace  of 
Nature,  which  is  the  elan  and  impetus  of  whole 
sane  life.  The  soul  is  split  in  two,  a  schism  cuts 
across  it,  and  it  is  ready  for  corruption. 

In  the  first  instance  men  are  drawn  to  attempt 
this  schism  in  the  endeavor  to  escape  from  the 
mere  assaults  of  Nature;  but  in  the  social  order 
security  from  Nature  gets  itself  refined  into  the 
forms  of  privilege.  For  social  privilege  has  its 
origin  in  the  discrediting  of  the  human  spirit  and 
the  setting  up  of  an  arbitrary  and  external  law. 

This  is  the  great  temptation  of  the  stronger 
men  of  a  society.  For  if  they  can  but  bring 
themselves  to  contemn  the  sane  indicative  passion 
of  their  own  hearts,  they  can  get  all  the  crowd  to 


Wi 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

do  the  same ;  and  after  that  they  can  discover 
and  define  the  righteous  law  in  the  terms  that 
suit  themselves. 

Of  course  it  is  not  ordinarily  a  matter  of  craft 
or  imposture  ;  insincerity  could  never  convince 
the  crowd  for  long.  It  is  that  immedicable  sin 
of  Pharisaism  which,  from  a  sincere  faithlessness 
of  heart,  has  always  despised  this  naive  soul  of 
the  people  and  rebuked  the  blasphemy  of  the  Son 
of  Man. 

IV.  In  its  normal  exercise  intelledt  is  as  insep- 
arable from  the  elemental  passion  of  life  as  the 
light  from  the  heat  of  a  flame.  The  disinterested 
pursuit  of  truth  is  at  best  an  unconscious  affedta- 
tion,  the  blindness  of  the  pharisee.  A  man  can 
not  go  in  knowledge  further  than  the  reach  of 
his  real  interest  and  concern.  And  it  is  not  pos- 
sible to  discover  in  nature  any  such  thing  as  a 
non-human  law — a  law  unrelated  to  human  feel- 
ing. If  such  a  thing  existed  we  could  not  truly 
discover  it,  but  could  only  caricature  it  into  some 
kind  of  forced  congruity  with  our  soul-and-sense- 
penetrated  human  knowledge.  This  would  be 
34 


Arbitrary  Law 

discouraging  if  human  life  in  its  nature  went  less 
deep  than  the  roots  of  chemistry  and  physics. 
But  if  life  is  as  real  as  things,  the  impossibility 
of  escaping  from  the  human  point  of  view  is 
cheerful  enough,  and  does  not  preclude  the  prac- 
tical certainties  of  science. 

The  serene  and  confident  intellecft  ranging 
with  unterrified  eyes  the  vast  realms  of  the  uni- 
verse, sees  in  it  all  simply  the  expansion  of  a 
congenial  and  familiar  dwelling-place.  For  eons 
life  has  succeeded  in  making  itself  at  home  here 
in  a  narrow  way;  why  now  should  it  wince  at 
wider  horizons?  Standing  up  before  the  uni- 
verse, the  living  man  sees  in  it  just  a  great  sane 
living  body — corresponsive  throughout  with  his 
own  body — the  microcosm  exacflly  balancing  the 
cosmos. 

The  inmost  nature  of  Nature  is  seen  to  be 
human  nature.  And  the  knowledge  of  it — 
natural  science  —  is  like  knowing  a  man  —  a 
genial,  resistant,  cosmic- tempered  man. 

It  is  possible  to  know  a  great  many  things 
about  a  man  without  being  acquainted  with  him, 
and  it  is  possible  to  be  a  very  patient  investigator 
85 


|!A 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

of  Nature  without  acquiring  any  considerable 
amount  of  science.  Science  may  make  gains 
through  patient  investigations,  but  primarily  it 
is  not  itself  an  investigation  but  an  intimacy  and 
a  correlation.  Sheer  blank  staring  at  things  is 
not  conducive  to  science.  One  can  not  make  an 
inch  of  progress  without  assumptions — working 
hypotheses;  and  the  hypotheses  will  not  work 
unless  they  are  true.  So  you  can  learn  nothing 
about  Nature  unless  you  know  her  through  and 
through  already — just  as  you  can  not  understand 
a  word  that  a  man  says  in  the  sense  in  which  he 
says  it,  unless  you  know  the  heart  of  him  before 
he  begins  to  speak. 

The  man  that  you  love  and  trust  you  feel  to 
be  of  inexhaustible  resource  and  full  of  surprises. 
You  can  not  tell  for  a  certainty  what  he  will  do; 
you  can  only  be  sure  that  he  will  not  put  you  to 
moral  or  intelle<5tual  confusion,  that  his  adlions 
will  be  reasonable  and  humane.  So  Nature  is 
unfathomable,  surprising,  indefinable.  Its  circle 
can  not  be  squared.  Its  fluent  life  can  not  be 
caught  into  the  forms  of  an  abstract  logic  or  com- 
pa<5ted  into  inerrant  propositions. 
86 


Arbitrary  Law 

The  so-called  laws  of  Nature  are  discovered  to 
be  not  constitutional  but  only  by-laws,  relatively 
and  provisionally  applicable  —  good  for  frying 
fish  and  running  railroad  trains  only  so  long  as 
they  are  interpreted  by  cunning  craftsmen  with 
a  measure  of  human  genius  for  the  equitable 
corredlion  of  the  abstradl  law. 

Pure  science — science  for  its  own  sake — is  not 
science  at  all.  Nature  mocks  and  eludes  the 
passive  intellecfl  —  the  eunuchry  of  the  mind. 
She  aches  to  be  compassed  by  a  man — to  be 
challenged  from  a  lover's  heart  demanding 
answers  that  are  intelligible  to  a  man's  soul — 
reasons  that  are  human  reasons. 

V.  An  intelle(5l  without  a  will  is  cut  at  the 
roots  and  can  never  flower  into  science.  For  the 
intelledt  grows  out  of  the  will,  and  in  its  sanity 
and  strength  is  constantly  nourished  by  desire. 
The  intelle(5t  is  born  in  the  wrestle  with  the 
elements  of  nature  for  the  things  that  seem  good 
to  have.  The  inmost  web  and  texture  of  it 
is  will  and  choice — the  setting  of  things  in  their 
relative  places  with  reference  to  the  appetency 
87 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

of  life.  The  first  flicker  of  intelledl  is  to  be  dis- 
covered in  the  earliest  worm  of  the  dust  that 
was  shocked  out  of  oblivion  by  the  external 
necessities  of  a  divided  way  and  roused  to  a 
choosing. 

To  be  the  primary  worm  and  to  be  appealed  to 
by  the  close  feel  of  a  forage  that  is  good,  and  by 
the  smell  or  sound  or  sight  of  one  that  is  better 
but  harder  to  crawl  to,  and  then  to  make  the 
great  refusal,  forsaking  the  line  of  least  resistance 
and  risking  the  way  of  the  laborious  ideal — that 
is  to  be  the  first  of  scientists  and  the  founder  of 
civilization.  It  is  the  beginning  of  the  intelledl. 
Ever  since  that  first  adventure  of  faith,  the  grow- 
ing power  of  the  intelledl  has  been  a  waxing 
energy  of  choosing — a  clarifying  of  desire. 

It  deepens  and  strengthens  by  dint  of  choices 
that  are  costly  and  ever  costlier,  and  it  flames  up 
into  its  most  vivid  consciousness  when  the  will 
goes  forth  in  contempt  of  all  the  senses  to  seize 
upon  the  things  that  are  eternal — ^but  always  its 
life  and  vigor  is  desire. 

The  exfoliation  and  fulfilment  of  one's  own 
nature  through  the    confident  embrace  of  the 


Arbitrary  Law 

world-nature  and  the  wrestle  with  its  elements 
to  get  the  things  one  cares  for — that  is  the  only 
sound  method  of  science.         '«^*-««--~-«««-«««^- 

VI.  Modern  science — in  its  sane  moods — pro- 
ceeds upon  an  immense  assumption  of  faith — to 
wit,  that  Nature  is  unitary,  that  it  is  one  vast, 
whole  and  organic  body,  that  it  is  humanly 
reasonable  clear  through  and  viable  to  intelledl. 
This  assumption  is  made  in  the  face  of  the  uni- 
versal experience  of  the  diversity  and  multi- 
fariousness of  nature — the  infinite  variability  of 
phenomena.     It  is  a  surpassing  ac5l  of  faith. 

And  the  fruitfulness  of  modern  science,  its 
pradlical  availability  for  the  uses  of  civilization, 
is  accurately  proportionate  to  its  humanism — its 
adherence  to  the  human  point  of  view  and  free- 
dom from  abstraction. 

It  accomplishes  most  in  the  regions  where  it 
is  least  dogmatic.  Its  Synthetic  Philosophy  is  a 
monument  of  futility,  but  its  management  of  the 
confessed  mystery  of  lightning  is  the  poem  of 
the  age. 

VII.  It  is,  then,  the  revelation  of  the  Modern 

39 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

Spirit  that  truth  for  a  man  is  to  be  had,  not  in 
the  form  of  abstradl  propositions,  but  only  in 
experience.  The  absolute  is  discovered  to  be  not 
in  any  stated  law  or  formula,  but  in  the  living, 
protean  soul — so  that  men,  if  they  would  keep 
the  garden  and  get  justice  done  upon  the  earth, 
must  break  the  hypnotic  spell  of  abstradl  prin- 
ciples and  live  out  riskily  into  the  changeful 
world.  The  Will  must  bridle  and  bestride  the 
Intellect  if  it  would  ride  to  its  heart's  desire. 

This  subjecflion  of  the  will  to  the  intelledl  is 
the  psychology  of  the  modern  spirit  and  the  clue 
to  what  is  charadleristic  in  modern  history.  It 
marks  the  transition  of  the  consciousness  of  man- 
kind from  the  status  of  a  creature  living  by  an 
external  law,  and  wistfully  longing  for  knowledge 
as  to  what  kind  of  a  being  it  ought  to  be,  to  the 
status  of  a  creatorship  that  is  law-making  and 
self-governing. 

The  soul  sets  out  to  impose  itself  upon  the 
universe  with  confidence  that,  in  spite  of  appear- 
ances, it  is  possible  to  do  so;  that  the  constitution 
of  the  universe  is  not  alien  to  the  soul;  and  that 
the  natural  laws  exist  not  to  intimidate  the  spirit 
40 


Arbitrary  Law 

of  a  man  but  only  to  harden  the  bones  and  stiffen 
the  thews  of  his  liberty. 

The  intellect  ceases  to  be  the  master  of  the 
will  and  becomes  its  servant.     The  world  aban- 
dons the  attempt  to  think  out  a  way  to  right  liv-       '  {7 
ing,  and  determines  to  live  and  learn. 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 
CHAPTER  III 

THE  TWO  OPPOSITE  SANCTIONS  OF  SOCIAI.  ORDER 

I.  According  to  the  depth  of  a  man's  sanity  is 
the  strength  of  his  passion  for  order.  A  sane 
man  is  one  that  spends  his  working  days  in  put- 
ting things  in  order  and  his  holidays  in  rejoicing 
that  it  is  possible  to  do  so;  while  utter  misery 
and  madness  is  simply  the  persuasion  that  the 
world  is  hopelessly  out  of  joint,  and  that  the 
grounds  of  the  soul  have  shifted  into  chaos.  In- 
sanity and  folly  are  descriptions  of  a  defedlive 
sense  of  order  or  a  feeble  passion  for  it. 

We  rejoice  in  relations  and  proportions,  or  else 
we  do  not  rejoice  at  all;  and  the  difference 
between  a  reasonable  person  and  a  fool  is  little 
else  than  that  the  former  generally  puts  the  first 
thing  first,  while  a  fool  puts  the  second  or  third 
there.  So  civilization  is  the  expression  in  man- 
ners and  institutions  of  the  passion  for  order.  It 
is  the  fulfilment  of  the  intellect,  the  delight  in 
law. 

42 


Sanctions  of  Social  Order 

Civilization  is  not  an  exadl  science;  it  is  a 
miracle  of  fine  art.  And  as  fine  art  is  the  put- 
ting into  materials  of  more  than  mere  materials 
can  possibly  contain,  so  the  work  of  civilization 
is  to  accomplish  the  marvel  of  expressing  the  in- 
finite spirit  of  liberty  in  the  definite  forms  of  law. 

II.  The  foundations  of  the  social  law  go  down 
to  unfathomable  depths.  The  infinite  element  is 
due  to  the  fadl  that  a  man's  natural  strength  and 
wisdom  are  disproportionate  to  his  interest  in  the 
world.  There  is  a  large  overplus  of  interest  that, 
in  the  nature  of  things,  can  not  get  itself  ade- 
quately expressed  in  terms  of  law,  but  must 
always  press  in  upon  the  law,  shaping  its  ordi- 
nances in  tentative  conformity  to  an  insatiable 
ideal. 

This  element  of  infinity  might  conceivably  be 
eliminated  from  the  social  constitution  by  rem- 
edying in  either  of  two  ways  the  disproportion 
between  mortal  strength  and  human  interest. 

The  constitution  could  be  reduced  to  measur- 
able proportions,  and  its  foundations,  from  the 
bottom  up,  would  stand  in  plain  sight,  if,  on  the 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

one  hand,  the  people  could  be  endued  with  prac- 
tical omniscience  and  physical  immortality,  or  if, 
on  the  other,  they  could  be  brought  to  take  a 
sufl&ciently  weak  and  shallow  interest  in  real  life. 

The  former  method  of  effedling  an  equation 
does  not  lie,  it  appears,  within  the  scope  of  our 
possibilities.  But  the  latter  method  has,  in  the 
history  of  the  world,  been  tried  again  and  again, 
and  always  with  considerable  success.  The 
secret  of  success  in  tyranny  is  the  shallowing  of 
the  people's  interest  in  this  real  world,  either  by 
diverting  their  hopes  to  another  or  by  dulling 
their  sensibilities  and  depressing  their  self- 
respedl.  And  the  society  which  is  most  tyran- 
nical, and  so  most  superstitious  and  sordid,  is 
the  very  one  in  which  the  social  strudlure  is  most 
measurable  and  definite,  most  amenable  to  the 
methods  of  what  goes  by  the  name  of  pure  in- 
duc5live  science. 

In  the  Chinese  Empire  an  effort  has  been  made 
on  a  grand  scale  and  through  a  disciplinary  regi- 
men of  ages  to  eliminate  the  infinite  from  history 
by  squaring  the  soul  to  a  mathematical  definition 
of  prudence  and  propriety.  And  China  still 
U 


Sanctions  of  Social  Order 

offers  the  choicest  extant  laboratory  for  our 
savants  of  the  newly  invented  science  of  soci- 
ology. But  they  must  be  quick  with  their 
statistical  machines,  for  there  are  signs  that 
that  Infinite  which  for  so  long  has  beat  to  wind- 
ward in  the  offing,  biding  its  time,  is  now  about 
to  enter  full-sail  into  Chinese  history. 

III.  Now  the  infinite  and  incalculable  element 
underlying  the  social  constitution  is  the  subje<5l- 
matter  of  religion.  Religion  is,  in  its  nature, 
a  taking  account  of  the  infinite  with  reference 
to  its  resources  for  furthering  or  thwarting  the 
heart's  desire.  It  is  the  inevitable  attempt  of  the 
human  spirit  to  form  a  working  estimate  of  the 
characfler  of  that  all-encompassing  Unknown 
Quantity  in  life  which  is  always  dealing  with  us 
and  disposing  of  our  affairs,  whether  we  will  or 
not.  Religion  begins  at  the  point  where  the 
things  that  men  really  care  about  outgo  their 
mortal  reach  and  understanding.  It  is  therefore 
universal,  so  far  as  human  ideals  are  universal. 
Society,  of  whatever  sort,  presupposes  ideal 
interests,  and  therefore  presupposes  religion — 
45 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

presupposes  in  the  people  an  interested  estimate 
of  the  characfler  and  disposition  of  the  Unknown 
Quantity.  And  society  can  not  have  a  unitary 
and  coherent  constitution — ^must  be  merely  in- 
choate and  nebulous,  or  else  dissolving  and 
anarchic — unless  a  controlling  element  of  the 
people  rest  in  a  practically  concurrent  estimate 
of  the  Unknown.  The  existence  of  a  social  state 
requires  not  merely  religiousness  but  a  definite 
religion. 

There  may,  indeed,  be  many  different  cults,  a 
variety  of  forms  of  worship;  that  is  not  a  material 
matter ;  and  there  may  be  many  theologies — 
philosophies  wrought  in  the  cold,  dispassionate 
realm  of  the  abstradl  intelledl,  creeds  written  in 
the  mere  memory  and  custom  of  men,  and  passed 
down  along  the  dwindling  lines  of  tradition — 
these  things  are  of  slight  and  measurable  import- 
ance. 

But  the  religion  of  the  people,  the  a(5lual  and 
interested  estimate  of  the  charac5ler  of  that  incal- 
culable Soul  and  Body  of  the  Universe  in  which 
our  little  fabric  of  social  order  is  embosomed  as  a 
ship  in  the  sea — this  religion  is  the  force  and 
46 


Sanctions  of  Social  Order 

sinew  of  civil  law;  and  when  it  suffers  definitive 
schism,  social  order  becomes  an  impossibility. 

IV.  There  is  a  sense  in  which  it  is  true  to  say- 
that  society  always  has  been  and  always  must 
be  ruled  by  force.  For  human  life  is  an  embodi- 
ment of  ideal  things  in  material  forms,  the  effec- 
tuation of  ideas  in  the  dynamics  of  nature.  And 
the  most  humane  and  millennial  society  can  not  be 
conceived  of  as  expressing  its  ideals  in  abstrac- 
tion from  economic  needs,  or  maintaining  its 
organization  otherwise  than  through  the  control 
of  natural  forces. 

In  another  and  more  important  sense,  however, 
society  never  has  been,  and  never  can  be,  ruled 
by  force,  since,  as  has  been  pointed  out,  the  social 
constitution  is  always  grounded  upon  religion. 
A  mob,  a  horde,  there  may  be,  living  from 
day  to  day  by  the  sheer  rule  of  the  strongest. 
But  the  idea  of  social  law  can  not  arise  until  a 
controlling  element  of  the  people  are  convinced 
of  a  common  religion — agreed  upon  a  common 
way  of  access  to  that  overmastering  Energy  of 
the  Universe  upon  which  society  must  continu- 
47 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

ally  draw  for  the  enforcement  of  its  law.  The 
savage  warriors  of  a  primeval  commonwealth  may 
raise  their  most  muscular  bully  upon  his  shield 
and  proclaim  him  king,  but  he  rules  not  by  force 
of  his  muscles — any  two  or  three  of  his  liegemen 
might  meet  him  and  undo  him — but  as  the  fit 
representative  of  those  transcendent  brutalities  of 
nature  which  are  the  objedl  of  the  common  wor- 
ship at  a  certain  stage  of  human  development. 

Now,  in  a  third  and  final  sense,  a  sense  most 
significant  of  all — and  this  is  the  particular  point 
of  this  chapter — the  truth  is  that  society  passes 
in  the  long  course  of  history  from  the  rule  of 
natural  forces  to  the  rule  of  the  human  ideal. 

V.  In  the  earlier  stages  of  its  career  society  is 
governed  by  economic  and  defensive  necessity; 
in  the  latter  stages,  through  a  process  which  is 
both  evolutionary  and  revolutionary,  it  accom- 
plishes its  enfranchisement  in  such  a  heartening 
of  the  people  as  enables  them  to  compass  the 
natural  laws  and  convert  them  to  ideal  and  human 
uses. 

The  soul  of  tyranny  is  not  the  egotism  and 
48 


Sanctions  of  Social  Order 

oppression  of  the  ruling  class.  That  is  only  an 
incident.  The  life  of  social  injustice  is  the  faith- 
lessness of  the  whole  people.  It  is  the  common 
thraldom  to  the  conception  of  a  law  of  necessity, 
a  fatality  inherent  in  the  nature  of  things — 
which  is  regarded  as  stronger  than  the  soul  of 
humanity  with  all  the  forces  that  humanity  can 
possibly  bring  to  bear. 

The  apparent  arbitrariness  of  Nature — giving 
to  men  and  withholding  from  them  health, 
strength,  beauty — is  what  gives  countenance  and 
confidence  to  the  sentiments  of  hereditary  privi- 
lege and  legitimism.  It  is  this  seeming  arbitra- 
riness, therefore,  that  grounds  the  aristocratic 
regime.  For  the  principle  of  aristocracy  is  the 
idea  of  natural  or  divine  eledlion,  the  idea  that 
some  men's  lives  are  worth  more  and  are  more 
deserving  than  other  men's.  But  this  is  not  a 
class  idea,  tho  it  seems  on  the  surface  to  inure  to 
the  benefit  of  a  class.  And  the  conception  that 
underlies  it,  the  conception  of  the  rightful  and 
inevitable  domination  of  the  external  law  of  the 
universe  over  the  internal  law  of  humanity,  a 
conception  which  to  a  great  extent  still  engrosses 
49 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

the  common  mind,  is  not  and  never  was  a  class 
feeling.  And  they  can  never  come  at  the  heart 
of  the  social  problem  who  approach  it  with  class 
prejudice  or  in  the  prepossession  of  special  in- 
terests. 

The  ruling  classes  have  from  of  old  ruled 
because  of  their  representativeness.  Social 
classes  provide  themselves  from  time  to  time 
with  an  assortment  of  class  opinions,  but  deep 
beneath  the  surface  of  opinion  the  course  of  so- 
ciety is  direcSled  by  the  genetic  ideas  of  its 
strongest  spirits,  and  these  ideas,  preached  or 
unpreached,  pass  out  to  the  boundaries  of  the 
community  by  an  irresistible  contagion. 
C'  It  would  seem  that  successful  governments 
always  have  been  and  always  will  be  admin- 
istered by  minorities.  But  it  is  equally  apparent 
that  they  always  have  been  and  always  must 
be  supported  by  majorities. 

The  crux  of  the  social  problem,  the  issue 
between  the  old  regime  and  the  new,  is  a  ques- 
tion of  the  religious  convidlion  of  the  common 
human  mind  as  it  faces  the  stupendous  mystery 
of  the  universe. 

60 


Sanctions  of  Social  Order 

So  long  as  the  people  regard  the  transcendent 
Force  or  Spirit  of  the  Cosmos  as  a  power  non- 
human  and  alien  to  humanity,  so  long  society, 
under  whatever  political  form,  will  continue  to 
support  a  privileged  class,  and  will  continue,  in 
spite  of  ever}^  protest  of  social  sentiment,  to  be 
ruled  by  a  principle  of  economic  and  defensive 
necessity.  On  the  other  hand,  if  the  common 
mind  of  men  can  be  brought  to  regard  the  great 
Cosmic  Power  as  essentially  human,  it  will  be 
possible  to  frame  and  execute  a  social  law  that 
shall  consider  the  liberties  of  persons  above  the 
sanctity  of  property  or  the  grandeur  of  the 
state,  and  that  will  give  pradlical  expression  to 
the  human  ideal. 

VI.  It  is  the  fatalism  of  the  people  that  gives 
san(5tion  and  strength  to  arbitrary  and  unequal 
codes  of  law.  From  the  beginning  the  heart  of 
the  people  has  quailed  not  so  much  under  the 
lash  of  the  masters  of  society  as  beneath  the  in- 
cubus of  that  terrific  and  unintelligible  law, 
natural  or  divine,  of  which  the  masters  seemed 
to  be  the  favored  and  authentic  adminis- 
51 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

trators.  The  paramountcy  of  status  and  the 
rights  of  property  over  free  contradt  and  the 
rights  of  persons — the  thraldom  of  economic 
privilege — is  a  bitter  fruit  that  has  grown  from 
that  radical  infidelity  of  the  heart  wherein  men 
have  rejedled  the  fair  Bden  of  their  own  ideal 
and  cowered  in  the  idolatry  of  an  external  rule 
of  good  and  evil. 

The  gravamen  of  privilege  is  not  inequality  of 
material  possessions.  The  longing  for  an  equal- 
ity of  goods  is  the  platitude  of  mechanical  minds 
or  the  Utopian  dream  of  envy.  The  mastery  of 
materials  and  the  appropriation  of  the  good  of 
things  is  the  prerogative  of  an  intense  and  afflu- 
ent life.  And  the  statutes  can  never  run  for  long 
against  wisdom  and  capacity,  tho  indeed  it  is  to 
be  noted  that  wealth  does  not  consist  in  the 
owning  of  things,  but  in  the  appreciation  of 
them. 

The  gist  of  the  social  crime  of  privilege  is  the 
legal  emphasizing  of  personal  inequality,  the  in- 
stitutionalizing of  the  fatalistic  dodlrine  of  nat- 
ural or  divine  eledlion.  The  abolition  of  privilege 
means,  therefore,  not  the  equalizing  of  fortunes, 
52 


Sanctions  of  Social  Order 

but  the  reconceiving  of  the  whole  fabric  of  the 
law  in  a  new  spirit,  so  that,  whereas  in  the  past 
its  chief  emphasis  has  been  laid  upon  the  safe- 
guarding of  exceptional  deserts,  it  shall  hence- 
forth concern  itself  solely  with  the  guaranteeing 
of  a  common  liberty,  the  giving  to  every  man  the 
utmost  chance. 

VII.  The  real  interest  of  democracy,  in  its 
negation  of  the  principle  of  deserts,  is  to  exalt  and 
emancipate  the  human  spirit. 

It  is  as  much  concerned  for  those  that  have 
been  regarded  as  the  most  deserving  as  for  those 
that  have  been  supposed  to  be  the  least  so.  Its 
program  runs  in  the  interest  of  the  upper  as  well 
as  the  lower  classes.  For  the  operation  of  the 
principle  of  deserts  degrades  all  alike  in  the  sub- 
jedlion  of  the  human  spirit  to  an  arbitrary  and 
unhuman  law.  It  assumes  to  measure  men  by 
a  mete-yard  of  things  and  circumstances,  and  to 
pay  the  soul  in  preferments.  Its  constant  appeal 
is  to  the  footman's  standard;  it  overwhelms  the 
will  with  clothes  and  furniture. 

The  beauty,  the  art  of  the  old  regime  is  pam- 
53 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

pered  and  lie<5lic,  a  feeble  and  ineflfedlual  protest 
against  the  besetting  fatalism  of  society.  For 
beneath  the  gilt  and  purple  of  the  old  order  is  the 
heart  of  the  mob,  the  adulation  of  brute  forces, 
and  the  terror  of  irrational  necessity. 

VIII.  Social  law  is  at  last  simply  the  obje(5lifi- 
cation  of  the  average  intelledl. 

The  xUtellecft  is  often  conceived  of,  in  the  fancy 
of  psychologists,  as  a  colorless  medium,  the  pure 
white  light  in  which  a  man  stands  face  to  face 
with  the  universe.  But  there  is  no  such  thing  as 
an  acromatic  intelledl.  The  essense  of  intelledl 
is  the  principle  of  order,  and  the  intelledl  must  be 
penetrated  through  and  through  either  by  the 
order  of  the  interior  life  of  the  man  or  else  by 
that  of  the  external  universe. 

All  human  ac5livity  may  be  summed  up  as  con- 
sisting in  the  attempt  to  bring  the  external  order 
of  the  universe  to  a  harmony  with  the  interior 
order  of  a  man's  life — his  sincere  conception  of 
what  is  desirable.  The  gist  of  all  thinking  and 
working  is  the  endeavor  to  ease  the  strain  of  the 
disparity  between  the  desire  of  the  heart  and 
54 


Sanctions  of  Social  Order 

the  fadls  of  the  world.  And  since  in  all  sound 
thinking  and  working  both  terms  of  the  contra- 
didlion  are  to  be  accepted  as  indisputably  real,  it 
follows  that  the  contradidlion  can  be  resolved  only 
by  a  kind  of  subjedlion  of  one  of  the  terms  to  the 
other. 

From  this  point  of  view  the  description  of  the 
old,  undemocratic  regime  is  that  therein  the  pre- 
vaiUng  tendency  is  to  ease  the  strain  of  the  con- 
tradidlion  by  discrediting  the  human  will,  and 
subjedling  the  internal  order  to  the  external, 
while  in  democratic  society  the  opposite  is  the 
case. 

IX.  The  unblurred  consciousness  of  the  reality 
of  this  fundamental  contradi(5lion  of  life  is  the 
indispensable  condition  of  social  stir  and  progress. 
Without  it  society  lapses  into  stagnation.  It  is 
better,  more  conducive  to  the  ultimate  triumph 
of  the  principle  of  democracy,  that  the  prophets 
of  the  people  should  despise  human  nature  and 
the  ideal  order  that  it  contains,  than  that  they 
should  deny  the  reality  of  the  contradicflion  or 
hold  out  hopes  of  resolving  it  without  a  struggle. 
55 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

It  is  more  democratic,  more  bracing  to  the  self- 
respedt  of  the  people,  that  they  should  strive  to 
pluck  their  own  hearts  out  and  fling  them  upon 
the  altars  of  Moloch  than  that  they  should  swoon 
away  into  a  denial  either  of  the  reality  of  nature 
or  of  their  own  sincere  desire.  The  popular 
dodlrine  called  Christian  Science  undoubtedly  has 
at  the  heart  of  it  an  old  and  familiar  truth,  but 
its  affedled  disregard  of  the  material  world  is  one 
of  the  morbid  signs  of  the  times.  It  is  the  fitful 
recoil  of  a  sick  society  from  an  opposite  infatua- 
tion— that  obsesssion  of  machinery  which  for  a 
century  has  overwhelmed  the  will  and  enfeebled 
the  feeling  of  personal  existence.  But  social 
decadence  follows  upon  every  kind  of  denial  of 
the  reality  of  the  historic  struggle.  The  excesses 
of  spiritualism  are,  in  their  pra(5lical  effedls, 
scarcely  to  be  distinguished  from  those  of  mate- 
rialism, since  both  alike  fail  to  bring  the  affirm- 
ative ideal  to  bear  upon  the  adlual  conditions  of 
life.  The  controversies  between  the  pure  spirit- 
ualists and  the  pure  materialists — the  profession- 
ally religious  and  the  professionally  irreligious, 
the  blind  partisans  of  the  soul  and  those  of  the 
56 


Sanctions  of  Social  Order 

stomach — are  sham  battles.  They  have  no  con- 
siderable consequences,  no  real  issues,  because 
both  parties  are  convinced  at  heart  of  the  unreality 
of  the  task  of  life  and  the  futility  of  human 
endeavor.  Both  alike  dishearten  faith  and  evis- 
cerate its  meaning — for  the  greatness  of  that 
word  is  in  its  suggestions  of  resistance  and 
antagonism,  its  implication  of  the  need  of  patience 
and  labor. 

The  real  battles  of  history  are  those  that  are 
fought  between  the  aristocrats  and  the  democrats 
— between  those  that  try  to  give  every  man  his 
deserts  in  due  reward  or  punishment,  and  those 
that  strive  to  give  every  man  the  utmost  chance. 
For  these  are  battles  in  which  both  parties  realize 
that  life  is  a  stridl  and  perilous  trial- time,  and 
that  it  is  worth  while  to  try — the  one  endeavor- 
ing to  bring  human  nature  into  subjec$lion  to 
the  nature  of  things;  the  other  striving  with  equal 
resolution  to  subjedl  the  nature  of  things  to  the 
human  ideal. 

X.  The  persuasion  of  the  superior  authority 
of  the   external  law  is  the  explanation  of  the 
57 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

dominance  in  undemocratic  society  of  the  abstradl 
thinker  over  the  worker.  If  the  law  that  ought 
to  prevail  in  society  is  conceived  of  as  residing 
outside  of  humanity,  it  is  inevitable  that  society 
should  be  ruled  by  those  that  gain  a  reputation 
as  philosophers  and  seers.  But  if  the  legitimate 
authority  is  thought  of  as  residing  in  humanity 
itself,  then  the  commanding  social  stations  must 
be  given  to  such  as  show  a  pradlical  efficiency  in 
the  subjedlion  of  natm-e — those  that  succeed  best 
in  making  men  at  home  in  the  world. 

This  is  the  idea  that  lies  buried  under  a  wilder- 
ness of  cant  in  the  praise  and  patronage  of 
workingmen  and  the  talk  of  the  dignity  of  labor. 
Certainly  there  is  no  dignity,  only  indignity  and 
shame,  in  relucSlant  and  necessitous  toil;  but 
throughout  the  world  to-day  there  is  a  dawning 
perception  that  the  effedlive  worker,  in  whatever 
way,  is  the  true  and  modern  idealist,  the  legit- 
imate lord  of  life. 

XI.  To  put  the  proposition  of  this  chapter  in 
final  form :  Social  order  presupposes  the  prac5lical 
agreement  of  a  controlling  element  of  the  people. 
68 


Sanctions  of  Social  Order 

This  agreement  can  be  eflfedled  in  either  of  two 
ways. 

On  the  one  hand,  it  is  possible  to  get  men  to 
think  alike,  to  defer  to  the  same  things,  to  hold 
pra(5lically  identical  opinions  as  to  what  is  oblig- 
atory and  inevitable.  That  is  one  way  of  estab- 
lishing a  social  order;  it  is  the  old,  undemocratic 
way. 

On  the  other  hand,  it  is  possible  to  get  men  to 
want  congruous  things,  possible  to  bring  them  to 
a  concurrence  of  desire.  It  is  possible  to  so 
deepen  and  integrate,  to  so  sanify  and  purify  the 
wills  of  a  controlling  element  of  the  people  that 
they  shall  delight  in  and  heartily  maintain  a 
common  order.  This  is  the  modern  and  demo- 
cratic way. 

It  is  a  question,  in  fine,  between  getting  peo- 
ple to  fear  similar  things  and  getting  them  to 
have  congruous  desires — a  question  between  con- 
formity in  opinions  and  consentaneousness  of 
wills. 

The  faith  of  democracy  is  the  belief  that  the 
deepest  thing  in  the  individual  man  is,  after  all, 
his  humanity;  that  the  wills  of  men  are  not,  at 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

bottom,  irreconcilable;  that,  on  the  contrary,  the 
things  that  men  want  most  and  care  most  for  are 
those  that  are  most  human  and  freest  from  the 
taint  of  privilege. 


60 


The  Revolutionary  Church-idea 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE   RKVOI.UTIONARY   CHURCH-IDKA 

I.  Christianity  is  a  vast  enterprise  for  super- 
seding the  old  world-order  based  upon  a  concur- 
rence of  opinion  as  to  what  must  be,  whether  we 
will  or  not,  by  a  new  world-order  based  upon  a 
working  agreement  of  sane  and  reasonable  wills 
in  the  pursuit  of  what  is  desirable.  The  historic 
church  is  nothing  other  than  this  modern  world- 
order  in  its  imperfe(5t  development,  or  in  its 
failure  and  distradlion  through  disloyalty  to  its 
own  ideal. 

II.  The  root  of  all  religions  is  the  passion  for 
liberty.  They  spring  out  of  the  crossed  and 
thwarted  will,  and  express  the  desire  of  the  heart 
for  a  satisfadlion  that  seems  to  be  denied  by 
nature  and  the  real  world.  Religion  is  a  protest 
against  the  apparently  anti-human  elements  of 
the  world,  a  defiance  of  the  seemingly  unfeeling 

61 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

forces  of  Nature;  it  stands  for  liberty  against 
the  external  law.  Its  witness  is,  immemorially 
and  always,  for  the  miraculous,  because  to  the 
end  of  the  world  the  cause  of  liberty  must  be 
bound  up  with  the  belief  that  necessity  and  the 
fixed  law  are  not  everything,  that  there  is  a 
chance  in  the  universe  for  the  sheer  simple  pas- 
sion of  the  heart. 

After  all  the  subtleties  of  the  spiritual  special- 
ists and  the  political  philosophers,  liberty  can 
mean  nothing  else  to  an  unsophisticated  mind 
than  the  chance  to  do  what  one  really  wants  to 
do.  This  primitive  and  inextinguishable  desire 
of  the  heart  set  over  against  the  antagonisms  of 
rivals  and  enemies  and  the  seeming  fatality  of 
nature,  is  the  thing  that  religion  has  always 
dealt  with,  attempting  to  solve  somehow  the 
problem  of  liberty  and  to  thwart  or  diminish  the 
final  vidlory  of  Fate. 

III.  Religion  has  two  cardinal  phases:  it  is 
theocratic  and  democratic.  The  social  revolution 
consists  in  the  conversion  of  men's  minds  from 
theocratic  to  democratic  religion. 


The  Revolutionary  Church-idea 

Religion  may  be  said  to  be  theocratic  so  long 
as  the  accent  of  its  claim  for  liberty  rests  merely 
upon  the  assertion  of  the  liberty  of  God.  It  be- 
comes democratic  when  it  passes  on,  as  by  neces- 
sary inference  it  must  at  length  pass  on,  to  the 
proclamation  of  the  liberty  of  the  people. 

The  assertion  of  the  liberty  of  God  implies 
human  liberty,  for  to  lay  hold  of  a  god  that  can 
do  as  he  pleases  is  to  find  at  length  a  way  of 
escape,  albeit  a  fearful  way,  from  the  fatalism  of 
the  world. 

The  theocratic  religions  are  provisional;  they 
find  their  fulfilment  in  Christianity,  the  religion 
of  democracy.  Christianity  is  the  religion  of  revo- 
lution, but  since  the  revolution  that  it  proposes  is 
of  so  thoroughgoing  a  kind  that  it  can  not  be 
wrought  by  any  sudden  violence,  it  is  necessary 
that  for  a  long  while  it  shall  appear  as  in  process 
— a  new  polarity  of  social  organization  straining 
against  the  old. 

The  religion  of  democracy  is  thus  not  unre- 
lated to  the  theocratic  religions,  tho  it  stands 
among  them  wholly  unique  and  presenting  the 
sharpest  contrasts.     It  is  related  to  them  as  a 


UNIVERSITY 

OF 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

faith  is  related  to  a  hope  out  of  which  it  has 
grown  up,  or  as  a  child  that  is  born  is  related  to 
its  embryo;  there  is  a  great  difference,  even  a 
kind  of  reversal  of  all  vital  processes,  but  there  is 
unbroken  continuity. 

In  its  historic  forms  Christianity  is  seen  mak- 
ing its  difficult  way  in  the  world  through  con- 
tinual compromises  with  those  fixed  theocratic 
ideas  which  from  the  beginning  have  held  the 
minds  of  men,  and  it  is  only  in  its  mature  and 
modern  development  that  its  original  and  essential 
character  is  fully  disclosed. 

The  contrast  between  theocratic  and  democratic 
religion  may  be  described  in  a  great  variety  of 
ways,  but  the  most  radical  description  is  that 
under  the  former  regime  the  human  will,  or  what- 
ever lies  deepest  in  personality,  is  regarded  as 
creaturely — a  made  thing,  partaking  of  the  nature 
of  Nature;  while  in  democratic  religion  it  is  re- 
garded as  creative — a  maker  of  things  and  par- 
ticipant in  the  life  of  the  Creator. 

Accordingly,  theocratic  rehgion  looks  upon  the 
heart's  desire  of  an  ordinary  man  as  naturally 
unauthentic  and  dependent  for  any  degree  of 
64 


The  Revolutionary  Church-idea 

quasi-authentication  upon  the  arbitrary  will  of 
God,  while  democratic  religion  declares  that  the 
heart's  desire,  however  corrupted  by  lack  of  faith, 
is  in  its  primitive  character  as  deep  and  authentic 
as  the  heart  of  God  himself. 

It  follows  that  in  theocratic  religions  the  pas- 
sion of  the  heart — which  never  can  die  or  really 
deny  itself,  whatever  men  may  agree  to  say  or 
think  about  it — seeks  its  satisfacflion  through 
some  kind  of  compromise  with  the  will  of  God. 
Thus  the  salient  charadleristic  of  all  theocratic 
religions  is  the  principle  of  sacrifice,  the  essence 
of  which  is  the  getting  a  part  of  what  one  cares 
for  on  condition  of  giving  up  the  rest,  or  the  get- 
ting of  one's  heart's  desire  in  the  future  on  con- 
dition that  it  be  given  up  now.  This  way  of 
looking  at  things  is  charaderistic  of  all  the  ancient 
religions.  It  infec5ls  historical  Christianity  just 
as  everything  else  that  belongs  to  the  old  regime 
infec^ls  Christianity,  but  it  has  no  relation  to 
Christianity  except  that  of  stubborn  opposition. 

Christianity  comes  into  the  world  disclaiming 
all  compromise,  and  denying  all  need  of  sacrifice 
save  the  sacrifice  of  God  in  suffering  so  faithless  a 
65 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

world.  It  cuts  with  the  sword  of  Faith  the 
Gordian  knot  of  the  old-world  social  problem — 
declaring  that  the  problem  is  insoluble  to  the 
abstract  intellec5t,  but  that  to  the  Spirit  of  Adven- 
ture there  is  no  final  antagonism  between  the 
external  law  of  nature  and  the  inmost  heart's 
desire.  It  declares  that  a  man  with  patience  may 
make  himself  entirely  at  home  in  the  universe; 
that  it  is  arterial  all  through  to  the  circulation  of 
red,  human  blood,  and  that  the  social  law  is  just 
what  the  will  of  a  catholic  humanity,  working 
through  the  long  redemptive  travail  of  civiliza- 
tion, may  choose  to  make  it. 

IV.  The  promise  of  this  great  change  in  the 
social  order  was  a  corollary  of  the  proclamation 
that  a  man  had  been  born  who  was  of  the  same 
stuff  as  God — a  proclamation  that  was  accom- 
panied by  the  assurance  that  any  and  all  other 
men  might,  if  they  would,  share  the  life  of  this 
man — even  to  the  partaking  of  his  flesh  and  blood. 

It  was  by  this  road  that  the  modern  idea  of 
liberty  came  into  the  world,  the  idea  of  liberty  not 
as  the  privilege  or  accomplishment  of  superior 
66 


The  Revolutionary  Church-idea 

persons,  but  as  the  right  of  every  man  in  virtue 
of  his  mere  humanity.  For  the  assertion  of  the 
utter  reality  of  liberty,  its  independence  of  all 
conventionality  and  circumstance,  is  in  fa(5t  the 
same  thing  as  to  say  that  the  spirit  of  man  is 
begotten,  not  made;  that  it  stands  in  the  last 
accounting,  not  in  the  status  of  the  creature  but 
in  that  of  the  creator.  This  is  the  pivotal  point 
of  history.  If  a  man  is  at  last  just  a  creature  of 
God,  the  quintessence  of  dust,  he  must  to  the  end 
be  ruled — as  all  mechanisms,  even  the  most  exqui- 
site, are  ruled — by  an  external  law.  And  in  that 
case  the  sovereignty  of  government,  based  on  the 
foundations  of  economic  and  defensive  necessity 
or  of  an  extra-rational  duty  or  destiny,  is  inex- 
pugnably  established.  On  the  other  hand,  if  it 
be  true  that  a  man  lives  in  this  world,  or  by  any 
purification  of  his  soul  may  live,  as  kin  of  God, 
then  for  a  certainty  the  sovereignty  is  to  be 
established,  even  through  ages  of  vicissitude  and 
failure,  not  in  brute  force  or  necessity  but  in 
the  free  association  of  the  people. 

V.  The  Church  undertakes  to  coordinate  and 
67 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

catholicize  the  wills  of  the  people  for  the  pradlical 
governance  of  the  world.  It  would  reduce  the 
economic  and  police  forces  to  a  relation  of  organic 
subordination  to  the  human  ideal,  and  would 
abolish  the  infidel  empire  of  a  non-human  Must 
or  Ought. 

The  historic  church-idea  is  at  bottom  simply 
the  basing  of  civilization  upon  faith  in  the  eternal 
nature  of  man  and  the  reaHzation  of  the  equality 
of  persons.  It  is  the  attempt  to  establish  a 
universal  social  order  in  the  spirit  of  democ- 
racy. The  history  of  the  Church  is  the  story 
of  the  genesis  and  evolution  of  the  American 
ideal. 

In  its  original  conception,  the  Catholic  Church 
stands*over  against  the  old  Roman  empire  in  the 
same  sense  of  contrast  and  contradidlion  that  the 
American  ideal  presents  to  the  recrudescent 
empires  of  to-day.  The  inner  logic  of  primitive 
Catholicism  was  the  universal  demonstration  of 
the  sovereignty  of  the  people  and  the  subordina- 
tion of  secular  governments  to  the  service  of 
human  liberty.  But  the  inner  logic  of  a  principle 
is  of  course  very  far  from  being  identical  with  the 
68 


The  Revolutionary  Church-idea 

shapes  that  it  takes  on  when  it  enters  into  history, 
and  attempts  to  get  itself  expressed  in  the  alien 
and  oppugnant  elements  of  the  world. 

VI.  The  church-idea  has  suffered  three  prin- 
ciple perversions  which  may  be  named  ecclesi- 
asticism,  sacramentalism,  and  dogmatism.  These 
perversions  are  simply  the  diverse  aspecfls  of  the 
Church's  betrayal  of  its  own  revolutionary  cause 
under  the  stress  of  the  old-world  order.  They 
are  the  various  ways  iu  which  the  principle  of  the 
sovereignty  of  the  people  has  been  compromised 
under  the  pressure  of  the  opposite  principle — three 
ways  of  taking  the  heart  out  of  democracy, 
through  an  implied  denial  of  the  legitimacy  of 
the  common  desire.  What  is  called  orthodox 
Christianity  to  this  day  for  the  most  part  works 
and  speaks  under  one  or  other  or  all  of  these  per- 
versions. So  that  the  Christ  of  conventional 
Christianity  is  not  yet  clearly  disclosed  as  the 
vindicator  of  the  principle  of  democratic  society, 
but  is  seen  rather  as  if  unrelated  to  the  Modern 
Spirit  and  scarcely  human  at  all,  the  hierophant 
of  a  huge  supernal  corporation,  the  dispenser  of 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

spiritual  privileges  or  the  author  of  a  more  exqui- 
site Mosaism. 

The  word  ecclesiasticism  represents  the  idea 
that  sacred  interests  are  to  be  separated  from  such 
as  are  secular;  that  the  Church  has  an  existence 
and  a  mission  apart  from  secular  society.  In  its 
out- working  ecclesiasticism  becomes  the  negation 
of  civil  liberty  since  it  denies  the  real  and  spiritual 
significance  of  secular  history,  reducing  it  to  a 
meaningless  mechanical  process. 

Sacramentalism,  with  the  ideas  of  spiritual  dis- 
cipline that  go  with  it,  stands  for  the  conception 
that  good  persons  are  to  be  separated  from  the 
bad — the  old  world-idea  of  privilege  and  deserts. 
In  its  outworking  it  becomes  the  negation  of 
the  democratic  principle  of  equality.  Its  subtle 
logic  justifies  the  sovereignty  of  government — 
regarding  civil  magistrates  as  rewarders  and 
punishers,  the  arbiters  of  right  and  wrong.  It 
undermines  the  fundamental  democratic  idea 
that  government,  however  multifarious  its 
offices,  is,  after  all,  simply  a  perpetual  civil 
warfare  against  violence  and  privilege,  a  war- 
fare in  which  every  individual  that  wields  the 
70 


The  Revolutionary  Church-idea 

sword  of  civil  law  takes  a  personal  and  indefeas- 
ible responsibility. 

Dogmatism  stands  for  the  rule  of  the  abstract 
or  passive  intelledl — the  authority  of  the  intelledl 
over  the  will.  It  undertakes  to  establish  social 
order  on  a  propositional  basis,  institutionalizing 
the  distinction  between  true  and  false  proposi- 
tions. Before  the  Renaissance  and  Reformation 
it  was  possible  for  the  principle  of  dogmatism,  with 
its  firm  leverage  in  ecclesiasticism,  to  guarantee  a 
consistent  social  order,  in  the  spirit  of  the  old 
regime;  but  in  later  times  it  is  this  same  dogma- 
tism that  has  prevented  the  possibility  of  a  coher- 
ent social  order,  committing  the  world  to  the 
endless  confusions  of  sedl  and  party.  The 
modern  hope  of  a  working  social  agreement 
depends  solely  upon  the  clarifying  of  men's  wills 
to  the  attainment  of  a  mutual  reasonableness  and 
a  common  and  fraternal  desire. 

VII.  Over   against   the   sovereignty  of  state 
stands  the  church-idea  in  world-historic  antith- 
esis.     The  most  important  fact  in  the  history 
of  the  last  two  thousand  years  is  the  dual  polar- 
71 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

ity  of  social  organization  in  Christian  countries, 
the  phenomenon  commonly  described  as  the 
separation  of  the  Church  from  the  State.  Always 
and  everywhere  throughout  Christendom  the 
Church  has  in  some  sense  fixed  its  standard  out- 
side the  political  system,  and  with  more  or  less  of 
confidence  has  held  that  system  under  suspicion 
and  corredlion.  This  separation  has  been  most 
distindl  among  the  peoples  with  whom  the  mod- 
em and  democratic  spirit  has  been  most  influen- 
tial, and  has  tended  toward  effacement  among 
the  peoples  that  have  been  relatively  unaffedled 
by  that  spirit.  Accordingly,  the  separation  of 
the  Church  from  the  State  is  more  pronounced  in 
America  than  anywhere  else,  and  of  all  nominally 
Christian  countries,  is  most  slight  and  theoretical 
in  Russia. 

The  phenomenon  in  question  is  peculiar  to 
Christianity.  Among  non- Christian  peoples  the 
cause  of  religion  has  always  been  identified  with 
that  of  the  existing  political  order,  and  the  relig- 
ious oflSces  have  been  regarded  as  fundlions  of 
the  state. 

It  is  to  be  noted,  however,  that  the  separation 
78 


The  Revolutionary  Church-idea 

of  spiritual  offices  from  secular  offices,  the  dis- 
tindlion  in  charadler  between  the  priest  and  the 
soldier,  has  always  been  most  clearly  maintained 
under  the  old  theocratic  regime.  The  principle 
of  the  separation  of  Church  and  State  is  not 
therefore  to  be  confounded  with  that  of  the 
separation  of  sacred  and  secular  interests.  Its 
real  purport  is  the  very  opposite  of  that.  The 
Church  is  separated  from  the  State  under  the 
claim  that  the  old  world  distin(5lion  is  fallacious, 
and  that  the  spiritual .  interests  of  humanity  are 
the  real  interests  and  have  a  right  to  dominate  the 
whole  range  of  secular  life.  The  Church  breaks 
from  the  patronage  of  the  State  and  plants  its 
standard  of  democracy  outside  the  sphere  of  theo- 
cratic politics — determined  to  make  a  New  World 
on  eternal  and  spiritual  principles,  and  to  heal  the 
old  schism  between  sacredness  and  secularity. 

VIII.  From  the  beginning  of  the  era  the  spirit- 
ual genius  of  Christianity  has  discerned  the 
necessity — for  the  regeneration  of  the  nations — 
of  establishing  in  every  land  a  new  and  demo- 
cratic center  of  social  organization. 
73 


The  Ajffirmative  Intellect 

The  principle  of  this  establishment  is  obscured 
by  the  confusions  and  cross-currents  of  history, 
and  nowhere  does  it  find  its  ideal  and  perfedl 
illustration.  Nevertheless,  the  principle  is  per- 
fedtly  clear.  At  one  pole  of  the  social  life 
stands  the  sovereign  government,  the  center  of 
a  dominating  social  theocracy;  at  the  other  stands 
the  institutional  organization  of  Christianity,  the 
heart  of  inchoate  democracy.  As  the  government 
is  not  the  state  but  only  the  center  of  the  state — 
since  the  state-idea  comprehends  the  whole  social 
system  in  its  minutest  ramifications  and  takes  in 
all  the  people,  including  the  knaves  and  traitors 
— so,  on  the  other  hand,  the  institutional  organ- 
ization of  Christianity  is  not  the  Church;  for  the 
church-idea  takes  in  the  whole  social  system  too, 
and  includes  all  the  people,  even  the  scribes  and 
Pharisees. 

The  social  center  of  gravity,  the  center  of  pre- 
vailing influence,  in  sovereign  states  falls  within 
the  government,  and  generally  coincides  with  the 
personality  of  the  chief  executive.  The  power  of 
the  Church  is  forever  drawing  against  the  old 
order;  its  aim  is,  through  the  operation  of  vital 
74 


The  Revolutionary  Church-idea 

and  interior  social  forces,  gradually  to  absorb  and 
efface  the  principle  of  state  sovereignty,  shifting 
the  social  center  of  gravity  to  the  reasonable 
heart  of  the  people  and  superseding  the  masters 
of  armies  by  the  masters  of  creative  forces. 

IX.  The  church-idea  is  the  germinal  principle 
of  this  era,  the  key  to  modern  history,  and  the 
spring  of  the  evolution  of  democratic  society. 
But  in  its  intellec5lual  definition  it  is  itself  an  evo- 
lutionary produdl,  a  conception  which  could  not 
possibly  have  been  put  into  words  two  thousand 
years  ago — or  two  hundred. 

Ideas  produce  events,  but  events  readl  upon 
ideas,  shaping  them  to  new  conceptions  forever 
more  elemental,  more  simple.  The  church-idea 
has  no  abstradl  validity;  it  grows  up  through 
events,  and  it  is  rooted  in  an  event — to  wit,  the 
life  of  Jesus. 

The  historic  Christ  is  a  sublime  and  representa- 
tive personality  around  whose  timeless  and  incom- 
parable name  are  gathering  through  the  ages  the 
powers  and  graces  of  a  rejuvenescent  humanity. 
His  convincingness  is  not  in  the  tales  of  prodigy 
75 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

that  the  wide-eyed  child- world  has  woven  in  his 
story,  but  in  his  invincible  reasonableness  and 
his  immense  success.  He  is  the  Master  of  history, 
entrenched  and  bulwarked  in  events — the  world's 
great  banker  and  promoter,  the  capitalizer  of  the 
people's  credit. 

His  uniqueness  is  not  arbitrary  but  historical. 
It  does  not  rest  in  the  inscrutable  decree  of 
providence,  but  in  the  logical  unfoldment  of  the 
drama  of  the  ages.  His  faithfulness  to  the  human 
ideal  precipitated  the  long-prepared  crisis  of  the 
world,  and  committed  the  nations  to  that  all-com- 
prehending revolution  which  is  shifting  the  center 
of  gravity  of  universal  society  from  the  temporal 
to  the  eternal. 

The  idea  of  a  Christ  exists  in  the  very  nature 
of  thought.  The  world  of  men  passes  through 
ages  of  experience  from  slavery  to  liberty,  from 
its  creaturely  to  its  creative  charadler.  The 
Christ-idea  is  the  ever-growing  and  brightening 
conception  of  the  kind  of  man  that  a  free  and 
creative  man  would  be.  This  was  prophecy  first, 
then  history. 

As  the  world  turned  upon  its  moral  axis  from 
76 


The  Revolutionary  Church-idea 

the  old  to  the  new  regime  it  was  inevitable  that 
some  signal  personality  should  stand  as  the  pivotal 
man.  It  was  also  inevitable  that  the  name  of 
that  man  should  get  itself  indissolubly  associated 
with  the  Christ-idea,  and  that  his  name  should 
become  the  symbol  of  the  new  age  and  the  hope 
of  a  universal  humanity. 

The  man  in  whose  name  the  principle  of  the 
sovereignty  of  the  internal  law  has  been  won,  is 
sure  to  be  the  first  citizen  of  the  planet  as  long  as 
it  shall  hold  its  course.  For  this  principle  is  the 
spring  of  all  moral  principles,  the  most  intimate 
pulse  of  life.  There  is  an  intrinsic  scale  and 
hierarchy  of  principles,  and  since,  in  the  ways  of 
human  nature,  it  is  certain  that  every  principle 
as  it  is  disclosed  and  vindicated  must  get  itself 
personified  in  a  particular  man,  it  comes  to  pass 
that  the  personal  life  that  disclosed  the  most 
commanding  principle  of  all  has  won  an  unpar- 
alleled fame  and  love. 

But  this  is  the  surface  view  of  the  subjedl. 

Ideas  are  only  the  shadows  of  life;  and  it  is  no 

satisfactory  account  of  the  life  of  Jesus  or  of  any 

other  world-moving  man  to  say  that  he  stands  as 

77 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

the  discoverer  and  exponent  of  a  great  idea.  The 
more  substantial  fadl  is  that  he  throws  all  men 
into  new  relations  to  each  other.  Kvery  event 
has  infinite  consequences;  the  central  event  of 
history  has  an  all-correlating  significance. 

Thus,  all  individual  lives  of  all  times  are  by 
the  event  of  the  life  of  Jesus  dislocated  from  their 
mere  natural  relationships  and  thrown  into  new 
and  spiritual  relations.  The  old  solidarities  of 
heredity  and  caste  are  broken  up  and  the  magnetic 
pole  of  a  world-wide  unanimity  is  unchangably 
established. 

It  is  in  the  personality  of  the  historic  Christ 
that  the  democratic  revolution  fixes  its  leverage 
against  the  sovereignty  of  state  and  th^  rule  of 
economic  necessity.  This  is  iho.  point  d'appui  of 
the  church-idea,  which  could  not  in  a  million 
years  have  won  any  considerable  credit  as  an 
abstradt  theory  of  philosophers. 


98 


Positive  Organization  of  Society 


CHAPTER  V 

THE  POSITIVE  ORGANIZATION  OF  SOCIETY 

I.  The  historic  church-idea  as  it  rises  and 
clears  to  its  definition  in  the  new  age  must  as  of 
old  have  organized  expression.  For  the  organi- 
zation is  of  the  essence  of  the  idea.  Democracy 
without  a  democratic,  catholic  Church  is  an  ab- 
stracftion  of  political  philosophy  and  never  can 
be  realized  on  the  plane  of  history.  The  sover- 
eignty of  the  people  without  a  concrete  represen- 
tation of  its  principle  is  as  barren  and  impractical 
a  thing  as  a  sovereign  state  without  a  sovereign 
government.  Political  democracy,  long  cherished 
as  an  ideal,  but  hitherto  disappointed  of  its  hope 
and  snared  in  the  futile,  changing  modes  of  state 
sovereignty,  must  now  at  length  in  its  extreme 
perplexity — if  it  would  escape  despair — obtain  for 
its  ideal  a  definite  embodiment. 
79 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

It  is  an  indispensable  condition  of  democracy 
that  there  should  be  a  distindl  organization  of 
society  apart  from  the  sphere  of  politics.  For 
society  can  never  wield  the  forces  of  government 
to  the  ends  of  equality  until  it  shall  establish  a 
standing-ground  whereon  to  realize  its  existence 
and  unity  outside  the  governmental  machine. 
The  people,  a  commanding  element  of  the  popula- 
tion, must  escape  from  the  transcendental  and 
theocratic  conception  of  government,  and  must 
come  to  hold  it  with  a  firm  grip  as  a  thing  con- 
ventional and  provisional,  before  they  can  use  it 
with  masterful  responsibility  in  subservience  to 
the  human  ideal.  So  long  as  the  government  is 
looked  upon  as  a  providence  and  the  arbiter  of 
right  and  wrong,  it  will  be  the  keeper  of  the 
people's  conscience  and  the  center  of  social 
organization.  The  military  and  police  power, 
standing  as  a  kind  of  sublimation  of  the  elemental 
forces  of  Nature,  will  be  the  objedl  of  the  com- 
mon devotion,  and  in  the  secret  corners  of  their 
souls  the  people  will  do  homage  to  the  brute- 
gods.  The  principle  of  miHtarism  and  plutocracy 
does  not  turn  upon  the  question  of  a  large  army 
80 


Positive  Organization  of  Society 

or  a  small  one,  or  upon  the  ups  and  downs  of 
trusts.  It  is  a  mental  attitude,  the  reverence  for 
irrational  forces,  in  denial  of  the  ideal.  And 
whatever  the  braver  spirits  may  do,  the  mass  of 
men  will  continue  to  worship  the  irrational  forces 
until  such  time  as  the  forces  of  reasonableness 
shall  succeed  in  humbling  the  brutalities  of 
society  with  the  specftacle  of  a  serene  and  con- 
fident order  that  does  not  derive  its  title  from 
fear  of  hunger  or  force  of  arms. 

II.  A  genuine  democratic  society  is  one  that 
does  not  rest  upon  the  patriotic  principle  or  the 
law-abiding  habit,  but  upon  the  existence  of  a 
controlling  element  of  the  people  that  may  be 
depended  upon  not  to  play  the  mob.  It  is  not  a 
question  of  majorities.  A  comparatively  small 
minority  standing  together  will  suffice  for  every 
emergency,  since  with  a  people  that  live  in  the 
open  air  of  the  real  world  sanity  is  a  contagion. 
Nor  is  it  a  question  of  producing  a  multitude  of 
infallible  persons  who  have  perfedlly  subdued  the 
mob-spirit  that  lurks  at  the  bottom  of  every 
man's  soul.  A  solid  and  dependable  nucleus  of 
81 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

reasonableness  may  be  maintained  in  a  commu- 
nity in  which  every  single  member  is,  from  time 
to  time,  a  fanatic  or  a  fool. 

The  church-idea  is  the  establishing  of  the  mag 
netic  pole  of  an  eternal  Humanity  as  a  rallying- 
point  for  the  general  reasonableness.  And 
democracy  depends  not  upon  the  perfedlion  of 
any  individual  or  class,  but  upon  the  unshakable 
fixity  of  that  pole — just  as  theocratic  societ}^  de- 
pends upon  the  unimpeachableness  of  the  title  of 
the  president  or  king. 

The  realization  of  a  genuine  democratic  society 
has  waited  upon  the  ability  of  the  people  to 
understand  the  church-idea  in  its  simplicity, 
stripped  of  the  disguises  that  it  has  been  obliged 
to  take  on  in  order  to  make  its  way  through  the 
contradictions  of  the  old  regime. 

These  disguises,  generalized  under  the  names 
ecclesiasticism,  sacramentalism,  and  dogmatism, 
have  been  penetrated  by  the  light  of  the  modern 
spirit  one  after  another  in  the  order  named,  and 
have  been  greatly  discredited — if  not  altogether 
cast  off.  So  it  is  at  least  with  the  peoples  that 
have  accepted  the  Reformation. 


Positive  Organization  of  Society 

III.  The  principle  of  ecclesiasticism  as  a  prac- 
tical working-force  in  secular  history  may  be  said 
to  have  come  to  its  end  in  the  sixteenth  century. 
Up  to  that  time  it  had  been  of  immense  but,  on 
the  whole,  of  steadily  dwindling  importance. 

The  Church  of  the  first  three  centuries  exhibits 
Christianity  swathed  in  its  most  ecclesiastical, 
sacramental,  and  dogmatic  disguises.  For  eccle- 
siasticism is  in  principle  the  dissociation  of  the 
sacred  order  of  society  from  the  secular,  and  it 
is  only  incidentally  concerned  with  prelacy  or 
the  rule  of  priests.  It  was  at  its  maximum 
strength  in  the  early  Church — so  strong  that  the 
spiritual  order  was  thought  of  as  barely  touching 
the  earth  with  the  hem  of  its  robe  of  ascension. 
Sacramentalism  then  wrought  a  clear  breach  be- 
tween the  saved  and  the  lost,  and  dogmatism  con- 
ceived of  salvation  as  depending  upon  the  accepta- 
tion of  a  few  bald  propositions  containing  the 
minimum  of  ethical  rationality.  From  the  begin- 
ning of  history  the  Church  has  grown  more  and 
more  secular.  Thus  it  has  grown  more  and 
more  Christian,  notwithstanding  the  scandals  of 
the  papacy  and  the  corruptions  of  the  cloisters. 
83 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

For  the  decay  of  the  things  that  pass  away  is 
the  means  of  their  passing. 

It  is  to  be  noted  that  the  putting  away  of 
ecclesiasticism  is,  in  a  large  general  way,  histor- 
ically and  logically  corresponsive  with  the  estab- 
lishment of  the  principle  of  constitutionalism. 
For  constitutionalism  signalizes  the  breach  be- 
tween the  Church  and  the  State.  It  is  the  appeal 
from  the  authority  of  the  sovereign  to  the  com- 
mon sense  of  the  people,  an  appeal  which,  in 
human  nature,  could  never  have  been  taken  if 
the  barons  and  the  burghers,  in  the  prosecution 
of  their  ordinary  business  as  citizens  of  a  com- 
monwealth, had  not  felt  themselves  invested  with 
spiritual  powers  in  some  sense  superior  to  those 
of  the  sovereignty. 

Now,  constitutionalism  is  not  democracy;  it  is 
the  joining  of  issue  with  the  old  order  in  the 
serious  struggle  for  democracy.  Considered  as 
a  social  condition  it  is  illogical  and  transitional. 
It  calls  in  question  the  sovereignty  of  the  prince 
or  president,  but  it  affords  no  solid  footing  for 
the  sovereignty  of  the  people.  Civil  society  can 
not  rest  permanently  upon  a  series  of  legal  propo- 
84 


Positive  Organization  of  Society 

sitions  any  more  than  the  narrower  domestic 
society,  the  family,  can  do  so.  In  the  family  there 
must  be  the  patria  potestas — the  unquestionable 
authority  of  the  head  of  the  house — or  else  free, 
unpledged  personalities,  agreeing  in  what  is  reason- 
able. There  is  no  permanently  tenable  middle 
ground.  And  so,  in  civil  society  there  can  be  no 
harmonious  and  self -consistent  social  life  so  long  as 
the  case  stands  undecided  between  the  sovereign- 
ty of  the  state  and  the  sovereignty  of  the  people. 

IV.  In  the  United  States  to-day  the  people  are 
bewildered  with  the  long  controversy.  They 
have  been  shamed  by  the  taunt  that  their  govern- 
ment is  a  debilitated  and  crippled  thing,  lacking 
the  powers  that  belong  to  the  sovereignties  of  the 
Old  World;  and  there  is  danger  that  they  will 
give  up  the  fight  and  restore  to  the  state  the 
panoply  of  sovereignty  which  has  been  stripped 
ofE  in  six  centuries  of  constitutional  struggle, 
unless  there  shall  soon  be  shown  a  way  that  plain 
men  can  see,  for  the  achievement  of  a  command- 
ing and  unitary  social  order  on  the  basis  of  the 
sovereignty  of  the  people. 
85 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

With  the  stripping  off  of  ecclesiasticism,  the 
old  regime  revenged  itself  by  swathing  the 
church-idea  in  new  and  thicker  veils  of  sacra- 
mentalism  and  dogmatism. 

The  medieval  Church  had  never  known  a 
spiritual  discipline  so  sharp  and  decisive  between 
man  and  man,  or  a  thraldom  to  abstradl  proposi- 
tions so  absolute  as  that  which  marked  the  earlier 
course  of  Protestantism.  And  similarly,  it  is  to 
be  observed,  that  when,  after  centuries  of  warfare 
with  words  and  blows,  the  sacramental-idea — the 
idea  that  religion  exists  to  separate  the  faithful 
from  the  heretic — was  generally  discredited,  then 
the  forces  of  all  the  wrong-headedness  in  this 
world,  which  theretofore  had  made  their  election 
of  two  or  three  kinds  of  perversity,  gathered 
themselves  together  with  undiminished  devotion 
in  the  redoubtable  fortress  of  pure  dogmatism. 

For  after  all  the  definitions  and  distincflions, 
this  word  dogmatism  will  ser^^e  tolerably  well  as 
the  roll-call  of  all  the  great  delusions  of  the 
world,  for  it  sums  up  the  particulars  of  that  rule 
of  the  passive  intelledl  over  the  will,  which  is  the 
original  and  universal  sin. 
86 


Positive  Organization  of  Society 

V.  The  nineteenth  century  was  the  age  of 
sudden  discoveries  and  of  vast  and  unpremeditated 
expansions  of  the  circle  of  commerce.  Thus  the 
spirit  of  dogmatism  was  turned  most  efifecflively 
against  itself  in  the  violence  of  the  collision 
between  opposite  schools,  policies,  sedls,  and 
parties. 

Never  before  had  dogmatism  been  so  rife;  never 
hafpure  intelledl  lorded  it  more  insolently  over 
the  will;  never  had  men  denied  more  vehemently 
the  authority  of  the  soul,  or  sought  more  confi- 
dently for  an  arbitrary  and  non-human  law  that 
should  settle  all  things,  social  and  scientific.  But 
the  ages-old,  unbroken  spell  of  the  passive  in- 
telleifl  has  been  in  these  latter  years  subjec5led  to 
a  stupendous  reduSlio  ad  absurdum.  This  Hydra- 
headed  Unholy  Ghost  of  dogmatism  has  been 
heard  babbling  its  infallible  oracles  in  a  thousand 
jangling  voices,  and  so  at  last  has  suffered  the 
advertisement  of  its  shame.  The  abstradl  intelledl 
has  discredited  itself  in  the  gloating  excesses  of 
its  triumph.  And  in  very  despair  of  finding  any- 
where on  earth,  in  school  or  cabinet,  in  sedl  or 
party,  a  credible  external  authority,  men  are 
87 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

being  driven — with  whatsoever  of  reludlance — to 
believe  in  their  own  souls.  It  is  a  pity  that  we 
could  not  have  come  to  the  enfranchisement  of 
Christianity  on  more  honorable  terms,  but  it  is 
enough  to  have  found  the  way  on  any  terms. 

VI.  The  gradual  deepening  and  simplifying 
of  the  church-idea  is  the  grand  spiritual  motive 
of  the  drama  of  the  Middle  Ages.  The  Church 
bred  at  her  own  breast  the  children  of  the  Reform- 
ation and  of  modern  democracy.  The  men  of 
the  modern  spirit,  the  creators  of  what  is  modern 
in  modern  society,  are  the  true  champions  of  the 
Church,  the  continuators  of  the  apostolic  tra- 
dition. 

The  Reformation  was  not  a  revolt  against  the 
church-idea;  it  was  a  revolt  against  those  impedi- 
mental elements  of  the  medieval  Church  that 
hindered  the  success  and  progress  of  that  idea. 
In  the  Reformation  the  great  stream  of  historic 
Christianity,  long  confined  within  narrow,  ecclesi- 
astical limits,  debouched  upon  the  broad  surfaces 
of  secularity .  Civil  society  itself  became  the  suc- 
cessor of  the  medieval  Church.     The  Protestant 


Positive  Organization  of  Society 

se<5ls,  so  far  as  they  stood  apart  from  the  struggle 
for  social  liberty,  and  were  conceived  of  as  having 
bounds  less  broad  than  those  of  civil  society,  were 
but  signs  of  the  persistence  of  the  ecclesiastical 
tendency.  They  stood,  and  still  stand,  as  the 
evidence  of  an  imperfedl  apprehension  of  the 
historic  church-idea  and  an  imperfedl  under- 
standing of  the  charadler  of  modern  society. 

The  medieval  Church  at  its  worst  was  morally 
commanding.  It  always  played  its  part  in  the 
real  and  passionate  world-struggle,  because  it 
always  claimed  a  tentorial  jurisdi(5lion  and 
would  not  admit  that  any  class  of  the  people 
could  stand  outside  its  pale.  It  was  always,  in 
some  effecflual  sense,  representative  of  the  social- 
revolutionary  principles  of  Christianity.  On  the 
other  hand,  it  is  the  suflScient  condemnation  of 
the  modem  sedls,  in  spite  of  their  special  virtues, 
that  they  have  no  vital  interest  in  these  principles. 
Unless,  therefore,  we  are  to  suppose  that  the 
middle  stream  of  modern  tendency  has  been  lost 
in  the  sand,  we  are  bound  to  conceive  of  the 
great  idea  of  the  Christian  era  as  seeking,  in  the 
midst  of  all  the  seething  cross-currents  of  post- 
89 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

Reformation  history,  a  finer  and  truer  embodi- 
ment than  the  Roman  and  Protestant  secSls  can 
possibly  afford. 

The  Reformation  was  the  announcement  of 
the  fadl  that  the  great  issue  between  the  sov- 
ereignty of  the  state  and  sovereignty  of  the 
people  could  no  longer  find  expression  in  the 
rivalries  of  popes  and  emperors.  The  issue  passed 
to  a  new  and  more  intimate  phase,  as  the  moral 
consciousness  of  the  world  reached  nearer  to  a 
mastery  of  the  moral  definitions  that  were 
involved.  Thenceforth  the  passion  of  the  struggle 
lay  between  the  institutions  of  the  old  regime, 
bulwarked  in  authority  and  privilege,  and  the 
upspringing  life  of  the  new  nations.  Here  and 
there  in  diverse  lands  the  democratic  spirit  found 
a  tentative  expression  in  the  forms  of  national 
churches.  But  the  principle  is  in  its  very  nature 
cosmopolitan,  and  the  national  churches  have 
proved  inadequate,  exhibiting  a  constant  tenden- 
cy to  capitulate  to  kings.  Thus  the  cause  of  the 
sovereignty  of  the  people  has  been  adjourned  from 
time  to  time.  And  it  has  been  left  to  the  twen- 
tieth century  to  undertake  the  task  of  giving 
90 


Positive  Organization  of  Society 

definite  expression  to  the  post-Reformation  con- 
ception of  the  church-idea. 

Back  of  the  constitutions  of  modern  states  there 
stands  a  world-wide  humanity  challenging  the 
arbitrary  sovereignties  of  government,  and  breath- 
ing a  spirit  of  indomitable  and  expanding  liberty 
into  the  lifeless  letter  of  constitutional  law. 

How  to  give  prevailing  embodiment  to  that 
aspiration  of  the  people — this  is  the  grand  problem 
of  the  new  age. 

VII.  Americanism  is  not  a  local  principle;  it  is 
a  universal  principle.  The  historic  charadleristic 
of  the  American  spirit  is  its  supra-nationalism, 
its  universality.  Its  mission  is  to  show  that 
the  grounds  of  national  prosperity  are  in  the 
eternal  unity  of  things,  so  that  the  way  of  national 
self-realization  breaches  all  the  walls  of  protedlion 
and  exclusion,  and  commits  the  national  destinies 
to  the  free-flowing  currents  of  the  world.  The 
uniqueness  of  this  land  is  that  it  is  the  cross- 
roads where  all  ways  meet. 

Along  these  embracing  shores  and  into  these 
vast  open  valleys  the  daring  spirits  of  the  earth 
91 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

have  passed  as  into  a  land  prepared  from  the 
beginning  to  be  the  synthesis  of  times  and  peoples. 
Asia  and  Europe  were,  in  the  creation,  broken 
up  and  partitioned  by  large  inland  seas  and 
impassable  mountain  walls,  for  the  breeding  of 
peculiar  tribes  and  the  differencing  of  racial 
experience;  but  America  was  planned  as  the  place 
of  the  All,  and  its  hospitable  plains  were  spread 
between  the  two  free  viable  oceans  that  the  peoples 
might  come  from  the  corners  of  Nature  to  the  dis- 
covery of  the  Wholeness  of  the  World. 

America  has  no  special  or  provincial  interests; 
its  mission  is  to  advance  a  catholic  and  all-con- 
taining law,  to  abolish  the  caste  of  climates,  and 
make  all  mankind  participant  in  the  wealth  of 
universal  history.  Its  genius  is  immeasurably 
expansive,  and  if  our  democracy  now  halts  and 
staggers  at  the  rim  of  the  continent  and  looks 
bewildered  across  the  seas,  it  is  because  it  is  not 
yet  wakened  to  its  own  genius.  The  urgence  of 
events  is  pressing  us  to  a  choice  between  apostasy 
from  our  own  ideal  and  the  taking  up  of  an  apos- 
tolate  of  world-wide  emancipation.  We  shall  not 
fail .  This  is  the  birth-hour  of  a  new  Catholicism — 
92 


Positive  Organization  of  Society 

the  epochal  moment  when  the  Holy  Spirit  of  the 
ancient  Church  descends  from  the  high  altars  to 
proclaim  in  the  market-places  a  fraternal  world- 
polity  and  the  real  communion  of  a  commerce  of 
boundless  reciprocity. 

VIII.  The  new  religious  forms  must  grow  up 
somehow  out  of  the  old  political  forms.  It 
appears  that  we  have  been  brought  to  such  a  pass 
in  the  history  of  this  country  that  we  can  hope 
for  no  solution  of  our  domestic  political  problem 
unless  we  take  into  consideration  the  whole 
world.  Henceforth  we  are  compelled,  even  in 
our  provincial  and  parochial  interests,  to  deal 
with  universal  principles.  But  universal  prin- 
ciples are  not  political  principles  at  all  in  the  old 
sense  of  politics.  They  are  religious  principles. 
Thus  politics  is  driven  into  the  realms  of  religion 
and  in  turn  religion  becomes  a  world-polity. 

In  the  Middle  Ages  the  church-idea  had, 
provisionally,  a  splendid  embodiment,  because  it 
escaped  from  the  jealousy  of  classes  and  stood 
aloof  from  the  stress  of  economics.  So  it  bided 
its  time.  By  the  sixteenth  century  the  idea 
98 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

had  grown  strong  enough  to  descend  to  closer 
quarters  with  the  tough  world.  It  wrought  it- 
self into  the  forms  of  national  churches  and  be- 
came the  power  of  the  people  in  the  long  struggle 
for  constitutionalism  and  the  republics.  But 
now  in  the  beginning  of  the  last  cycle  of  two 
millenniums  we  see  that  the  idea  has  grown 
stronger  still — strong  enough  to  venture  upon  a 
descent  into  the  very  dust  and  passion  of  the 
world,  and  to  seek  its  embodiment  in  the  forms 
of  a  political  party.  This  is  quite  in  the  way  of 
the  genius  of  the  incarnation.  Up  from  the  rank 
soil  of  politics  come  the  germinant  forms  of  demo- 
cratic Catholicism,  but  down  from  the  great 
historic  heights  of  Christianity  comes  the  spirit 
that  is  to  inform  and  use  them. 

IX.  The  political  party  in  America,  regarded 
as  a  social  phenomenon,  is,  in  its  external  aspec5l 
and  general  conception,  a  suggestive  embodiment 
of  the  church-idea.  What  has  been  lacking  is, 
that  its  party-spirit  should  be  translated  into  a 
spirit  of  humanity  and  universality.  In  all 
English-speaking  countries  there  has  been  a  con- 
94 


Positive  Organization  of  Society 

stant  tendency  to  divide  the  political  body  into 
two  great  parties.  This  is  a  tendency  diredlly 
related  to  the  prevalence  of  the  democratic  ideal 
and  consequently  less  manifest,  or  not  manifest 
at  all  in  countries  that  have  been  relatively 
unaffedled  by  that  ideal. 

The  two  parties  represent  the  democratic  ideal 
in  two  opposite  and  mutually  destrucflive  exagger- 
ations. And  in  the  attritions  and  collisions  of  a 
deepening  social  experience  it  seems  to  be  the  des- 
tiny of  these  two  contending  spirits  to  discredit 
each  other  and  to  give  rise  to  a  non-partisan  spirit, 
or  spirit  of  humanity,  which  shall  be  the  soul  of 
a  synthetic  and  universal  party.  In  the  United 
States  this  process  seems  now  to  be  on  the  eve 
of  its  consummation.  The  two  great  organiza- 
tions have  ceased  to  represent  the  rival  faiths  of 
men,  since  they  no  longer  have  in  them  any  con- 
siderable faith  at  all.  Their  vitality  has  been 
lost  in  a  gradual  hardening  process  until  they 
have  become  mere  mechanisms — huge  Franken- 
stein monsters  that  have  passed  beyond  the  con- 
trol of  their  creators.  Their  power  is  still 
enormous,  but  it  is  unvital.  It  is  derived  from 
95 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

the  moral  passivity  of  the  people.  The  party 
organizations  are  strong  in  the  degree  that  the 
people  are  lacking  in  the  convicftion  of  ideals  and 
possessed  with  the  sentiment  of  the  fatalism  of 
the  world.  The  politicians  rely  solely  upon  the 
economic  forces  and  the  fear  of  disaster. 

The  arrival  of  the  two  great  political  corpora- 
tions at  this  juncture  is  the  signal  for  the  rise  of 
a  social  organization  of  unexampled  character. 
It  is  evident  that  the  old  corporations  can  not  be 
redeemed  to  humanity,  and  it  has  been  shown  by 
a  multitude  of  experiments  that  the  people  will 
not  respond   to  the  half-faiths  of    the   fathers 
clothed  in  whatever  allurements  of  new-party 
programs. 
r"^     The  people  are  sick  of  the  party-spirit   and 
I      weary  of  fadlional  servitude;   they  are  longing 
I     for  the  spirit  of  liberty,  and  the  loyalties  of  a 
I     wider  humanism. 

^The  philosophy  of  the  original  moral  constitu- 
tion of  the  two  decadent  parties  may  be  variously 
expounded,  but  in  no  way  can  the  distindlion  be- 
tween the  spirit  of  the  two  systems  be  more 
simply  indicated  than  by  pointing  out  that  it  cor- 
96 


Positive  Organization  of  Society 

responds  in  a  general  way  to  the  historic  differ- 
ence between  Catholicism  and  Protestantism. 
Both  are  true,  and  both,  because  of  their  partial- 
ism,  are  false.  And  as  the  old  Catholicism  and 
the  old  Protestantism  are  both  destined  to  pass 
away  in  the  synthesis  of  a  democratic  Catholi- 
cism, so  the  principles  of  the  old  political  fa(5lions 
are  to  be  fused  in  the  same  synthesis. 

In  the  constitutional  history  of  the  United 
States  the  two  great  parties,  considered  together, 
have  served  in  a  dual  and  imperfedl  way,  to  effedl 
that  free  association  of  the  people,  which  is  the 
si7ie  qua  non  of  democratic  society,  as  a  guarantee 
against  the  tendency  to  absolutism  which  is  in- 
herent in  all  governments.  Without  the  great 
parties  the  general  government  must  inevitably 
have  stood  as  the  center  of  social  organization 
with  consequences  fatal  to  the  American  ideal. 
It  is  the  rivalry  and  alternation  of  great  and 
equal  fa<5lions  that  has  kept  us  from  that  old- 
world  idolatry  of  government  which  is  the  nega- 
tion of  the  moral  principle  of  constitutionalism. 
It  seems  that  a  century  or  more  of  the  recrimina- 
tion of  rival  partisan  administrations  was  neces- 
87 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

sary  in  order  that  the  American  people  might 
fully  escape  from  the  shadow  of  the  old  theocra- 
cies and  come  to  understand  that  a  government 
is  of  human  responsibility  and  not  a  gift  of  God. 
Thus  the  principle  of  party  organization  has 
stood  in  evident  opposition  to  the  old-world  prin- 
ciple of  the  sovereignty  of  the  state,  and  has  in- 
dicated, in  how^ever  tentative  and  vacillating  a 
way,  the  lineaments  of  that  democratic  Catholi- 
cism in  which  the  people  are  to  realize  their  ex- 
istence and  social  unity  outside  the  machinery 
of  state. 

The  party  organization,  notwithstanding  the 
poverty  and  partialism  of  its  spirit,  has  exhib- 
ited all  the  formal  charadleristics  of  a  true  em- 
bodiment of  the  church-idea.  If  it  were  not  for 
our  prolonged  experience  of  the  reality  of  such 
an  organization,  it  would  be  hard  to  prove  the 
possibility  of  it.  For  the  reality  is  so  vital  and 
fluent  that  it  eludes  the  conceptions  of  pragmati- 
cal and  unimaginative  minds.  The  party  organi- 
zation in  its  normal  and  popular  type,  before  it 
has  degenerated  into  a  mechanism,  illustrates  the 
historic  church-idea  in  the  essential  particulars 


Positive  Organization  of  Society 

that  have  been  indicated.  While  being  in  itself 
no  negation  but  a  living  and  potent  thing  stand- 
ing for  an  ideal,  it  may,  by  an  accommodation  of 
words,  be  described  as  non-ecclesiastical,  non- 
sacramental,  and  non-dogmatic.  This  accom- 
modation of  words  is  not  too  violent,  for  the  psy- 
chology of  church  and  party  is  the  same. 

To  begin  with,  then,  the  political  party  in  its 
youth  and  strength  does  not  conceive  of  its  own 
organic  interests  as  separate  from  the  interests  of 
the  whole  commonwealth,  but  attempts,  through 
the  attra(5liveness  of  its  ideal,  to  establish  in  the 
midst  of  the  commonwealth  a  polarity  of  free 
social  organization  that  shall  be  inclusive  of  all 
public  interests  and  magnetic  to  the  ends  of  the 
land.  The  party  is  on  the  decline  when  it  begins 
to  be  more  concerned  for  its  organization  than  for 
its  mission. 

In  the  second  place  the  normal  political  party 
does  not  try  to  separate  the  good  from  the  bad, 
the  wise  from  the  foolish,  but  invites  all  the 
people  to  come  in  their  sins.  When  the  tests  of 
partisan  orthodoxy  begin  to  be  applied  and  those 
that  lack  a  lineage  are  discriminated  against,  the 
99 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

party  is  passing  into  its  mechanical  stage.  The 
appeal  to  class  interests  is  the  sign  of  dis- 
solution. 

Finally,  the  party  organization,  in  its  original 
type,  rests  confidently  upon  the  unformulated 
reality  of  its  general  ideal.  It  makes  and  abro- 
gates platforms  and  programs  according  to  the 
exigencies  of  times,  but  refuses  to  be  ruled  by 
precedent  and  definition.  It  is  not  dogmatic.  It 
is  only  in  the  moribund  phase  of  its  existence 
that  the  councils  of  a  great  political  party  are 
ruled  by  scribes  and  pedants  that  ring  the  changes 
upon  the  formularies  of  the  past. 

Of  course,  no  political  party  was  ever  for  a 
moment  free  from  the  human  qualities  that  the 
words  ecclesiasticism,  sacrament alism,  and  dog- 
matism stand  for.  The  point  is  that  these  quali- 
ties are  not  the  strength  of  the  party  but  its 
weakness.  The  study  of  the  history  of  the  polit- 
ical parties  therefore  settles  the  question  as  to  the 
possibility  of  establishing  a  wide  social  organiza- 
tion, a  democratic  Catholicism,  on  a  basis  alto- 
gether different  from  that  on  which  the  existing 
se<5larian  churches  stand. 
100 


Positive  Organization  of  Society 

It  proves  that  an  effec5live  and  continuous  organ- 
ization can  be  maintained  on  sheer  ideal  grounds 
without  reliance  upon  successions,  sacraments, 
or  dogmas. 

X.  The  political  party  has  only  faintly  fore- 
shadowed the  organization  of  catholic  democracy. 
And  the  faintness  of  the  type  has  been  due  not 
only  to  the  fadt  that  it  has  been  partisan,  but  also 
to  the  fac5l  that  it  has  been  distincftively  political. 
The  genius  of  democratic  society  can  not  breathe 
its  full  breath  in  an  atmosphere  pervaded  by 
politics,  for  the  subordination  of  the  forces  of 
politics  to  the  uses  of  a  free  and  creative  humanity 
is  of  the  essense  of  democracy. 

In  the  old  order  of  the  world  the  cultivation 
of  the  humanities  depends  upon  the  political 
organization,  but  in  the  new  order  the  political 
organization  depends  upon  the  cultivation  of  the 
humanities.  The  old  regime  begins  with  law 
and  order,  and  strives  for  liberty;  the  new  begins 
with  liberty,  and  strives  for  law  and  order. 

The  great  men  of  letters  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury announced  the  discovery  that  fine  art  has 
101 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

its  roots  in  morality  and  law.  They  did  much  to 
close  the  gap  between  the  humanities  and  the 
common  life.  But  the  true  account  of  the  matter 
seems  to  be  that  morality  and  law  have  their 
roots  in  fine  art.  The  Church  of  the  twentieth 
century,  therefore,  will  better  the  instrucflion  of 
the  wise  men  of  the  nineteenth,  and  will  make  the 
firee,  creative  life  of  the  people,  the  life  of  fine 
art,  the  sole  basis  and  reliance  of  civil  law.  The 
political  parties  have  lost  their  vitalities  and  have 
become  machines  because  they  have  permitted 
their  interest  to  be  absorbed  in  a  machine,  the 
machine  of  government.  The  solution  of  the 
political  problem,  which  is  simply  the  problem  of 
vitalizing  and  humanizing  the  governmental 
machine,  is  seen  to  lie  in  a  social-political  organi- 
zation which  has  time  for  politics  every  day,  but 
lays  the  accent  of  its  interest  upon  the  dignity 
and  grace  of  ordinary  living. 

PoHtics  will  continue  to  be  a  game  of  politicians 
so  long  as  the  people  attend  to  it  only  once  in  a 
while.  There  is  need  of  a  political  primary 
that  shall  be  always  in  session,  and  there  is  need 
of  a  fertile,  flowering  soil  of  humanity  that  shall 
108 


Positive  Organization  of  Society 

send  a  steady  stream  of  vital  sap  up  into  tlie 
gnarled  and  withering  limbs  of  law. 

XI.  It  is  to  be  supposed  that  the  externals  of 
religion  are  about  to  undergo  a  great  change. 
The  symbols  of  a  half-theocratic  Christianity  can 
not  be  taken  as  sufficiently  expressive  of  the 
religion  of  democracy.  The  old  church  archi- 
te(5lures  must  give  place  to  types  that  are  indig- 
enous to  the  soil  of  liberty — types  more  magnifi- 
cent than  those  of  the  Middle  Ages,  since  the 
resources  of  modern  art  and  commerce  are  more. 
And  the  prisoned  artists  must  break  out  of  the 
mills  to  forge  the  world  into  human  shape  and 
make  the  cities  fit  for  souls.  The  sovereignty  of 
the  people  is  only  plain  speech  for  the  kingship 
of  the  Son  of  Man.  The  old  world-church  dedi- 
cated its  architedlural  glories  to  this  idea  and  the 
new  world-church  is  likely  to  do  the  same.  The 
time  may  be  near  at  hand  when  the  church  in  a 
country-town  will  be  as  grand  as  the  court-house 
or  the  jail. 

Democratic  religion  will  produce  new  types, 
but  the  old  will  not  be  despised.  Its  principle  of 
103 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

universality  relates  not  only  to  space  but  to  time. 
The  Church  which  stands  for  the  humanity  of  all 
lands  will  stand  also  for  the  humanity  of  all  the 
centuries.  The  people  will  always  respedt  the 
plebiscite  of  the  ages.  But  great  uniformities  are 
cheap.  It  is  easy  and  always  has  been  easy  to 
get  men  to  go  in  crowds  to  worship  at  the  shrine 
of  a  beauty  which  they  do  not  see,  and  can  not, 
because  they  go  in  crowds.  We  must  commit 
ourselves  frankly  to  our  great  enterprise ;  we 
are  bound  to  break  up  the  good  customs  that 
are  corrupting  the  world  and  give  the  sweet 
spirits  of  the  Hours  a  chance  to  flourish  in  the 
sunlight. 

XII.  The  Church  is  destined  to  pour  its  life 
into  the  university.  The  university,  as  it  exists 
in  the  United  States,  is  a  nondescript  thing,  mort- 
gaged to  the  past  and  reaching  aimlessly  toward 
the  future.  It  is  partly  a  monastic  survival, 
partly  a  subsidized  supporter  of  social  privilege, 
partly  a  trades-school,  partly  a  proprietary  insti- 
tution for  the  propagation  of  private  opinions,  and 
partly  a  hopeful  prophecy  of  what  is  to  come. 
104 


Positive  Organization  of  Society 

Now  the  university,  in  its  original  and  final 
definition,  is  the  stronghold  of  the  affirmative 
and  creative  intelledl.  The  university-idea  is  the 
bringing  of  the  whole  of  knowledge  pundlually 
to  bear  upon  this  present  place  and  moment. 
But  knowledge  has  no  wholeness  to  the  merely 
passive  mind — is  only  a  colledlion  of  irrelevant 
details,  a  medley  of  useless  curiosities.  It  acquires 
a  wholeness  and  the  university-idea  becomes 
realizable  only  when  the  intelledl  is  penetrated 
with  faith  and  acfluated  by  the  passion  of  the 
human  ideal. 

The  university  was  born  out  of  the  body  of 
the  church  and  suckled  at  her  breast.  In  its 
youth  it  rose  up  and  destroyed  ecclesiasticism. 
Its  work  for  the  future  is  to  continue  the  life  of 
its  mother.  These  institutions  of  dubious  learn- 
ing that  we  have,  smooth  proteges  of  million- 
aires and  half-starved  step-children  of  the  state, 
are  doubtless  something,  and  may  be  given  a 
name,  but  they  are  not  universities.  The  spirit 
of  the  university  can  not  grow  otherwise  than 
out  in  the  open  air  in  daily  venture  of  its  life. 

The  segregation  of  thinking  men  was  a  medi- 
105 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

eval  and  monastic  idea.  It  suited  the  genius 
of  ecclesiasticism.  For  the  times  that  are  com- 
ing, it  is  well  enough  that  the  technical  school 
should  lodge  its  expensive  apparatus  in  some  safe 
and  accessible  spot,  but  the  university  must  go 
with  the  Church  to  the  people.  The  talk  of 
academic  liberties  is  vain.  Where  and  when  was 
thinking  and  speaking  ever  free  to  those  that 
rested  in  vested  rights,  or  unfree  to  those  that 
would  pay  the  price  ?  And  in  all  reason  how  can 
the  world  be  expedled  to  assure  an  income  to 
those  that  break  its  idols?  The  people  should 
write  on  the  pediments  of  the  churches  for  the 
admonition  of  their  teachers:  We  are  foolish 
children  and  may  stone  you,  but  we  implore  you 
to  speak  the  truth. 

XIII.  Out  of  the  struggling  soul  of  Chris- 
tianity have  come  the  three  cardinal  institutions 
of  the  existing  social  order:  The  political  party, 
the  se<5larian  church,  and  the  organization  of 
learning  summed  up  in  the  university.  These 
three  things  in  their  rise,  their  growth  and  their 
predestined  decay  and  supersession,  may  be  best 
106 


Positive  Organization  of  Society 

understood  if  regarded  as  the  partial  and  exag- 
gerated forms  of  the  protest  of  the  democratic 
spirit  against  the  old  regime. 

These  institutions  can  give  real  and  permanent 
effedl  to  their  several  protests,  and  realize  their 
own  ideals  by  dying  and  pouring  their  life  into 
the  profound  and  simple  synthesis  of  a  demo- 
cratic Catholicism — the  positive  organization  of 
society. 

The  political  party  protests  against  ecclesias- 
ticism.  In  its  ideal  it  is  the  assertion  of  the  all- 
importance  of  the  real  and  present  world  of  living 
men.  It  affirms  the  moral  dignity  of  material 
civilization  as  involving  all  the  spiritual  issues. 
It  turns  its  face  resolutely  away  from  the  world 
of  ghosts  and  metaphysical  abstradlions,  holding 
nothing  sacred  that  is  not  secular,  and  declaring 
that  the  free  and  ideal  life  is  to  be  lived  here  and 
now.  But  it  fails  to  apprehend  the  spiritual  prin- 
ciple of  liberty.  It  is  shallow,  and  its  shallowness 
means  onesidedness  and  futility  in  the  struggle 
for  civil  liberty.  It  becomes  sacramental  and 
dogmatic — the  instrument  of  privilege  and  the 
slave  of  formularies.  It  ends  by  the  negation  of 
107 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

its  own  original  principle  in  a  thirst  for  an  un- 
economical— a  transcendental — glory . 

The  sectarian  church,  as  idealized  in  the 
minds  of  the  people,  stands  to-day  as  the  protest 
of  the  modem  spirit  against  sacramentalism  and 
as  the  assertion  of  the  primacy  of  the  principle  of 
charity  or  fraternity.  It  will  not  any  longer 
separate  the  deserving  from  the  undeserving.  It 
declares  that  brotherly  love  will  solve  all  prob- 
lems. But  the  virile  heart  is  not  in  it.  Its 
Christ  has  only  a  soul  of  soft  sentiments  and 
pity.  It  does*  not  believe  in  liberty  or  the  crea- 
tive spirit  of  man.  Its  fraternity  is  superficial 
and  unconvincing.  And  in  its  conscious  weak- 
ness it  has  recourse  to  a  recrudescent  ecclesiasti- 
cism  and  dogmatism  which  is  less  convincing 
still.  Its  extremity  is  the  denial  of  its  own 
specialty;  and  the  crowds  gather  in  the  streets 
to  accuse  the  churches  of  partialism  and  caste, 
and  to  pass  resolutions  that  their  charity  is  a 
sham. 

Finally,    the  university   stands  as  a    protest 
against  dogmatism,  the  last  of  the  triple  Fates. 
It  maintains,  as  its  point  of  honor,  the  freedom 
108 


Positive  Organization  of  Society 

of  the  intelle<5l.  But  the  university  also  is  with- 
out that  faith  which  is  the  life  and  breath  of  the 
modern  spirit.  It  does  not  yet  understand  that 
science  is  impossible  to  the  passive  intellecfl;  its 
soul  is  still  thralled  in  the  superstition  of  arbi- 
trary law. 

In  its  eagerness  to  escape  from  the  foul  spirit 
of  dogmatism,  it  flies  for  refuge  to  an  ideal  world 
and  to  the  strongholds  of  privilege.  And  in  the 
end  it  falls  into  the  arms  of  its  aversion — it 
becomes  the  mouthpiece  of  tradition  and  preju- 
dice, and  announces  fixed  opinions  with  the 
fearful  unanimity  of  caste. 

XIV.  In  a  true  and  searching  psychology  the 
great  trinity  of  errors  is  reducible  to  a  unity — to 
wit,  the  original  sin  of  dogmatism — the  rejedlion 
of  the  creative  authority  of  life  itself  in  the  pre- 
possession of  arbitrary  and  irrational  law.  When 
the  rejedlion  is  complete,  and  the  superstition 
unlighted  by  a  single  gleam  of  faith,  there  is  no 
room  for  any  other  error,  and  the  world  lies 
prostrate  with  an  utter  passivity  of  intelledl  in 
the  thralldom  of  an  unmitigated  despotism.  But 
109 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

in  the  gloaming  light  of  half- faiths  the  mind  re- 
ac5ls  against  this  abjedl  servitude,  and  ventures  to 
search  for  a  law  which,  while  not  related  to 
the  heart  of  man,  or  answering  his  sincere  de- 
sire, may  yet  serve  to  break  the  force  of  an  en- 
tirely irrational  tyranny.  It  is  thus  that  the 
other  two  cardinal  phases  of  falsehood  come  into 
play.  These  are  two,  not  one,  because  a  man 
with  a  half-faith  is  two  men.  He  is  drawn  hither 
and  thither  by  the  seesaw  of  the  ineradicable 
passion  of  his  heart  and  the  unescapable  f  ac5l  of 
the  external  world.  He  is  by  turns  an  a  priorist 
and  an  a  posteriorist.  He  is  torn  between  the 
rival  fanaticisms  of  spiritualism  and  materialism. 
In  his  endeavor  to  escape  from  despotism  he 
seeks  a  saving  law,  now  in  his  pale  etiolated  con- 
science and  now  in  the  hard,  mechanical  order  of 
the  material  world.  The  former  tendency  pro- 
duces the  ultra-spiritualism  of  religion,  the  latter 
the  ultra-materialism  of  politics. 

But  the  splitting  process  does  not  stop  with  a 
single  fission;    for  the  morbid  dualism  of  the 
heart-contemning  intelle(5l  is  a  force  that  is  con- 
stantly operative.     As  soon  as  it  has  wrought 
110 


Positive  Organization  of  Society 

one  schism,  cleaving  the  whole  of  life  into  two 
parts,  it  sets  to  work  on  each  of  the  parts  to  make 
two  more — and  so  on.  Religion  becomes  on  the 
one  hand  ecclesiastical,  interested  in  the  construc- 
tion of  a  purely  spiritual  state,  and  on  the  other 
hand  sacramental;  for  sacramentalism  is  merely 
materialism  stated  in  ecclesiastical  language. 
Kcclesiasticism  in  its  turn  becomes,  on  the  one 
hand,  an  a  priori  Protestantism,  and,  on  the 
other,  an  a  posteriori  Romanism.  Then  Prot- 
estantism bifurcates  into  the  abstra<5l  logic  of 
Calvin  and  the  literalism  and  traditionalism 
of  lyUther — and  so  forth,  to  the  end  of  the  long 
catalog  of  religious  se<5ls. 

Starting  with  the  other  term  of  the  original 
schism,  we  might  trace  in  the  history  of  politics 
the  same  process.  However,  there  is  a  constant 
tendency,  more  or  less  strong,  according  to  the 
common  sense  of  the  people,  to  clear  up  the  com- 
plication and  reduce  the  difficulty  to  its  original 
terms.  And  there  is  a  natural  congeniality  of 
extremes — the  rule  of  sentimentality  being  the 
rule  of  the  stomach.  In  this  way  things  get 
simplified. 

Ill 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

But  the  aim  here  is  to  point  out  that  all  the 
perplexities  and  contradic5lions  of  the  social  order 
have  their  spring  in  the  principle  of  dogmatism. 
It  follows  that  the  particular  social  institution 
that  is  conceived  of  as  specially  antagonistic  to 
this  principle  must  afford  a  strategic  point  from 
which  to  attack  the  general  confusion. 
I     The  university,  therefore,  holds  the  key  of  the 
I  situation.    To  carry  out  the  university-idea  in  the 
I  forms  of  politics  and  in  the  spirit — the  faith — of 
historic  Christianity — that  is  in  general  terms  the 
solution  of  the  problem  of  the  positive  organiza- 
tion of  society. 


112 


The  Axioms 
CHAPTER  VI 

THS  AXIOMS  OP  THB  AFFIRMATIVE   INTELLKCT 

I.  The  reje(5lion  of  dogmas  does  not  mean  the 
denial  of  creeds.  A  generation  of  men  can  not 
go  forth  to  the  remaking  of  the  world  without 
great  definitions,  exadl  and  rigorous  principles. 
Not  by  faith  alone,  or  by  any  power  or  passion 
of  the  soul,  can  the  world  be  put  in  order.  For 
order  is  a  principle  of  the  intelle(5l;  and  it  is  the 
intellecft,  renewed  and  empowered  by  the  confident 
will,  that  must  plan  the  strudlure  of  the  world- 
cities. 

The  old  creeds  are  nothing  to  us  so  far  as  they 
rest  upon  authorities,  but  they  are  passwords  to 
the  future  if  they  answer  the  heart's  desire. 

II.  Now  Christianity  is  not  a  peculiar  creed 
resting  upon  authority;  it  is  the  historical  devel- 
opment of  the  aflSrmative  intellec?^.  All  the  great 
do(5lrines  of  the  Church  are  implicit  in  the  fadt 
of  faith  itself. 

118 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 


I  rl 


L 


Qiven  a  thinking  man  face  to  face  with  death, 
disease,  and  the  cruelties  and  contradidlions  of 
the  world,  and  if  he  does  not  succumb  to  the 
stress  and  strain  and  become  half-hearted,  but 
adheres  with  faithfulness  to  the  law  of  his  own 
life,  then  the  great  dodlrines  of  the  catholic 
creeds  will  be  discovered  to  lie  bedded  in  the  very 
Structure  of  his  mind,  tho  he  may  never  have 
heard  of  Jesus  or" considered  the  theories  of  the 
theologians;  The  simple  truth  is  that  the  cath- 
olic faith  is  the  very  breath  of  human  desireli^lffie'' 
life  of  life  itself. 

Now  faith  is  cheap  to  children,  to  people 
that  do  not  think,  and  to  prosperous  people  of 
small  sympathy.  It  is  none  the  less  genuine  in 
such  persons,  but  faith  of  such  a  degree  is  not 
construdlcve  because  it  is  not  intelledtual.  It 
contains  no  answer  to  the  problems  of  the  defeated 
or  to  the  disquietudes  of  those  that  think  and 
feel  in  wide  horizons. 

From  the  beginning  the  social  strudlures  have 

been  built  by  men  of  comparative  strength  of 

mind  who,  because  they  were  men  of  intelledl, 

could  not  believe  in  life  as  children  and  the 

114 


The  Axioms 


unseeing  do.  Thus  the  social  structures  have 
been  built  in  unfaith.  The  whole  scheme  of 
social  law  from  immemorial  times  has  been 
warped  to  the  conceptions  of  a  passive  and  faith- 
less intellec5l. 

Into  such  a  world-order  comes  Christianity,  with 
its  proclamation  of  the  principles  of  faith — the 
chief  and  summary  things  that  a  man  wants  to 
believe  and  is  bound  to  believe  if  he  would  main- 
tain the  sincerity  of  tfie'^'universe,  tlfei*i:*eaiity  of 
his  personal  existence,  and  the  pracSicaBiIity  of 
his  own  ideal.  They  are  not  propositions  to 
think  about  or  talk  about,  to  argue  to  or  argue 
from.  As  propositions  addressed  to  the'  ni^fe 
refledliveness  of  men,  it  matters  not  at  all  whether 
they  be  rejecfted  or  accepted.  They  are  not  the 
flower  or  fruit  of  intelledl,  but  the  root  and  sap  ; 
not  forms  of  right  thinking,  but  the  formal 
vindication  of  the  right  to  think. 

The  emancipation  of  the  intelledl  for  the  work 
of  building  a  social  order  on  the  plan  of  the 
human  ideal  became  a  possibility  and  an  expec- 
tation when  first  a  man  grounded  his  conscious- 
ness in  the  Eternal,  and  gained  strength  of  heart 
115 


H 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

to  say  that  the  laws  were  for  men — not  men  for 
them.  This  was  to  demand  a  reversal  of  all  the 
social  currents  ;  it  put  the  will  above  the  under- 
standing, and  located  the  seat  of  authority  within 
the  soul.  Of  course,  the  flood  swept  over  this 
man,  but  it  could  not  submerge  him — for  the 
heart  of  the  world  was  secretly  with  him. 

III.  The  historic  mission  of  Christianity  has 
been  the  establishment  and  assurance  of  the 
affirmative  intelledl.  The  assumption  that  men 
can  be  saved  by  the  acceptance  of  right  forms  of 
thinking  is  precisely  the  fundamental  assumption 
of  that  ancient  order  into  which  Christianity 
came  as  an  alien  and  opposite  thing.  The  history 
of  the  pre-Reformation  Church  is,  on  the  whole, 
the  story  of  a  magnificent  struggle  for  intel- 
ledtual  liberty  against  the  superstitions  of  barba- 
rians and  the  dogmatisms  of  Judea,  Greece,  and 
Rome. 

There  is  not  a  single  dogma  of  the  Church  that 

does  not  contain  the  antidote  to  its  dogmatism — 

an  implication  of  the  subordination  of  dogmas  to 

the  principle  of  faith.    The  dogmas  of  the  Church 

116 


The  Axioms 

are  all  do<5lrines  of  liberty  clothed  in  such  terms 
as  to  render  them  not  utterly  repugnant  and  in- 
credible to  a  world  thralled  in  the  prepossessions 
of  fatalism,  skepticism,  and  social  slavery.  And 
there  is  not  a  single  great  primary  institution  of 
the  Church — as  baptism,  the  holy  communion, 
the  episcopate — that  does  not  in  its  original  con- 
ception and  practise  contain  an  implied  denial  of 
the  old-world  idea  that  society  depends  iipon 
established  institutions.  In  the  minds  of  its 
clearer  spirits  the  Church  was  never  an  institu- 
tion :  it  was  the  maker  and  unmaker  of  insti- 
tutions. 

The  formulation  of  Church  dodlrines  and  the 
setting  up  of  the  Church's  institutions  was  always 
a  pressingly  pra(5lical  matter  as  to  how  best  to 
commend  to  a  servile  and  insensate  world  the 
spiritual  principle  of  self-government  and  the 
authority  of  the  internal  law. 

The  radical  thing  in  Christianity  is  the  con- 
substantiality  of  a  man  with  God.  This  was 
dramatized  and  pressed  upon  the  credit  of  men 
in  the  sublime  formularies  of  Nicene  theol- 
ogy. The  doc5lrine  of  the  Trinity  is  the  imper- 
il? 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

ishable  charter  of  human  liberty.  It  is  the  very 
arrogance  and  insolence  of  faith,  the  taunt  of  the 
confident  will  flinging  its  defiance  to  formal  logic 
in  the  proclamation  that  God  shall  be  true  to 
Himself  and  Man  shall  be  true  to  himself,  and 
yet  the  Spirit  of  Order  shall  prevail  and  the 
Holy  City  shall  be  built! 

The  inner  logic  and  inevitable  social  conse- 
quence of  unitarianism,  or  pure  monotheism,  is 
despotism.  The  human  spirit  must  set  its  stake 
in  the  eternal  if  it  would  win  the  world  to  civil 
liberty.  So  long  as  everything  can  be  settled  by 
a  cry  of  '' God  wills  it,"  or  ''Great  is  Allah," 
there  is  no  chance  for  democracy.  It  is  neces- 
sary to  demonstrate  the  Ktemity  of  the  Human — 
the  absolute  Authority  of  the  Soul. 

The  Greeks  achieved  a  shallow  and  conven- 
tional kind  of  liberty  by  filling  their  Olympus 
with  divinities  that  were  frivolous — and  so  could 
be  laughed  down.  The  Jews  accomplished  the 
same  thing — cleared  a  little  space  for  the  sin- 
cerely human — ^by  making  a  contradl  with  Jeho- 
vah and  holding  him  stridlly  to  it.  But  a  real 
and  universal  social  liberty  was  not  so  much  as 
118 


The  Axioms 

conceivable  until  the  name  of  the  Son  of  Man 
was  shrined  in  an  equal  and  ineffable  greatness 
with  the  name  of  God,  and  not  until  the  rela- 
tion between  the  two  was  conceived  of  as  no 
captious  rivalry  or  hard  bargain  but  a  profound 
and  spiritual  kinship  which  gave  a  man  the 
charter  of  eternity  in  following  out  to  the  last 
definition  the  prompting  of  his  own  humanity. 

Indissolubly  associated  in  ancient  theology  with 
the  dodlrine  of  the  Trinity  is  the  doc5trine  of  the 
duality  of  nature  and  singleness  of  personality  in 
the  Son  of  Man.  This,  too,  is  implied  in  the  very 
principle  of  faith.  For  faith  is  faith  only  when 
it  faces  a  contradidlion  and  a  difficulty;  and 
the  doctrine  in  question  is  a  frank  avowal  that  the 
divine  image  has  feet  of  clay.  It  is  a  manly  recog- 
nition of  the  fadl  that,  in  a  certain  broad  aspedl 
of  his  existence  upon  the  earth,  a  man  is  creaturely 
— a  vi<5lim  and  subjedl  of  circumstances.  It  affirms 
that  life  is  a  real  struggle  of  the  creative  spirit 
against  the  fatality  of  the  world — for  the  realiza- 
tion of  integral  personality. 

Finally  the  great  dodlrine  of  the  Reformation — 
that  of  justification  by  faith  only — is  simply  a 
119 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

somewhat  scholastic  announcement  of  the  broad 
principle  in  hand — to  wit,  that  all  the  great  and 
saving  dodlrines  of  Christianity  are  implied  in 
the  very  fadt  of  faith  itself. 

IV.  The  history  of  the  post- Reformation  era  is 
the  history  of  the  gradual  translation  of  the 
transcendent  creed  of  earlier  Christianity  into 
more  ethical  and  pradlical  terms. 

The  dodlrines  of  the  Church  become  the  funda- 
mentals of  secular  society — Christianity  merges 
into  democracy.  The  creed  of  democracy,  like 
its  original,  is  merely  an  exfoliation  of  the  prin- 
ciple of  faith.  It  may  be  conveniently  summa- 
rized in  the  historic  formula — I^iberty,  Equality, 
Fraternity. 

lyiberty,  in  the  definite  democratic-revolution- 
ary sense  of  the  word,  means  that  common  human 
life  has  an  original  and  creative  character  and  is 
the  source  of  all  moral  authority.  It  negatives 
the  distindlion  between  sacred  and  secular 
interests,  and  denies  the  theocratic  authority  of 
the  Church  and  the  sovereignty  of  the  State.  It 
is  the  modern  and  democratic  unfoldment  of  the 
120 


The  Axioms 

Christian  do(5lrine  of  the  consanguinity  of  a  man 
with  God.  It  has  no  affinity  with  the  ancient 
Greek  idea  of  conventional  and  acquired  liberty, 
and  it  was  grossly  misconceived  by  Rousseau  and 
the  French  Revolutionists  in  their  theory  of  the 
absolutism  of  majorities. 

V.  The  dodlrine  of  equality  is  the  sequence  of 
the  dodlrine  of  liberty,  since,  however  greatly  men 
may  differ  in  their  creaturely  endowments,  the 
creativeness  which  is  attributed  to  all  men  is  a 
thing  in  its  nature  miraculous  and  infinite, 
baffling  all  standards  of  comparison.  As  a  work- 
ing hypothesis  equality  means  that  however  low  a 
man  may  fall  in  the  scale  of  success  he  never 
forfeits  his  rights  to  an  equal  consideration  with 
the  highest  in  the  scale.  It  means  that  in  a 
democracy  the  law  must  utterly  refuse  to  con- 
sider the  question  of  the  relative  deserts  of  men. 
It  has  no  competency  to  bestow  titles  of  nobility 
or  pass  bills  of  attainder;  it  can  utter  no  word  of 
praise  or  blame.  The  penal  code  exists  not  to 
punish  those  that  are  adjudged  to  be  bad,  but 
simply  to  defeat  those  that  seem  to  threaten  the 
121 


y 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

common  life.  The  whole  system  of  government 
and  law  is  conceived  of  as  a  perpetual  crusade  in 
the  interest  of  liberty — a  crusade  in  which  there 
is  no  blind  obedience  to  a  mystic  authority,  but 
every  citizen  bears  the  sword  of  law  as  a  personal 
responsibility. 

Equality  as  a  principle  of  jurisprudence  works 
a  revolutionary  change  in  the  spirit  of  laws,  and 
gradually  readjusts  the  forms  and  ordinances  of 
the  old  static  codes  to  a  new  and  dynamic  con- 
ception of  human  rights.  The  old  codes  were 
conceived  and  wrought  out  in  the  prepossession 
that  man  is  himself  a  creature  and  commodity  of 
God,  a  mere  thing — albeit  the  highest.  Accord- 
ingly they  approach  every  juristic  question  from 
the  standpoint  of  things — they  are  riveted  to  the 
proprietary  point  of  view. 

The  cry  of  the  oppressed  and  disinherited  for 
an  equality  of  possessions  is  the  echo  of  the 
sordidness  and  stupidity  of  the  ancient  masters 
of  the  law.  The  question  of  the  equality  or 
inequality  of  goods  is  an  impertinence — it  has 
nothing  to  do  with  the  real  issue.  And  the  code 
of  a  democratic  equality  will  refuse  to  be  a  divider 
123 


The  Axioms 

until  the  real  and  important  question  has  been 
answered — namely,  this:  Does  the  proposed  meas- 
ure make  for  the  creative  life  of  the  lowest  man 
concerned?  If  it  does,  then  no  title  or  vested 
interest,  tho  it  were  very  clear  and  long,  should 
stand  for  a  moment  in  the  way.  If  a  statute 
degrades  anybody  it  is  ipso  fa5lo  void.  The 
docftrines  of  liberty  and  equality  issue  from  a 
perception  that  there  is  a  life  in  men  that  is 
incommensurable  with  commodities,  so  that  no 
proprietary  title  can  be  good  in  law  that  does  not 
make  for  life. 

Democratic  law  is  not  a  dedudlion  from  the 
principles  of  nature — it  knows  nothing  of  the 
* '  Natural  Rights  of  Man  " ;  it  is  a  work  of  fine 
art,  and  its  concern  is  with  the  spiritual  and 
creative  rights  of  men.  It  holds  that  wealth — 
material  welfare — consists  only  in  a  very  limited 
and  secondary  way,  in  the  owning  of  things — 
that  it  consists  principally  in  the  power  to  vitalize 
things  with  the  forces  of  ideas.  The  absorbing 
interest  of  democratic  political  economy  is  the 
releasing  of  the  ideal  forces  to  their  maximum 
efficiency.  The  matter  of  ownership,  however 
123 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

important,  is  distindlively  subordinate,  and,  from 
a  democratic  point  of  view,  presents  no  grave 
perplexities,  but  tends  to  settle  itself  on  the 
general  principle  that  the  tools  belong  to  the  man 
that  can  use  them. 

VI.  Turning  now  to  the  final  term  of  the 
democratic  formula,  the  principle  of  fraternity  is 
by  no  means  to  be  taken  as  a  mere  sentiment  of 
sociability.  I^ike  the  principle  of  equality,  it  is 
a  profound  and  spiritual  corollary  of  the  primary 
postulate  of  liberty.  It  is  born  of  the  cool  sanity 
of  faith,  and  no  ardor  of  good-fellowship  can 
possibly  attain  to  it.  It  faces  the  problem  of  the 
collision  of  wills.  Men  strive  for  conflic5ling 
objedls — how  then  can  social  order  be  established  ? 
The  old  regime  solved  the  problem  by  denying 
the  validity  of  all  private  and  personal  wills;  in 
the  theory  of  the  sovereign  state  the  wills  of 
rulers  and  ruled  alike  are  subjec5led  to  an  external 
and  transcendent  authority.  Christianity,  democ- 
racy, looks  for  a  solution  in  the  opposite  diredtion. 
It  declares  that  the  collision  of  wills,  the  pursuit 
of  conflidling  purposes,  is  born  of  the  faith- 
124 


The  Axioms 

lessness  and  shallowness  of  our  living;  that  in 
the  bottom  of  men's  hearts  there  is  a  congruity 
of  desires,  a  harmony  of  all  individual  interests. 
This  is  the  doc5lrine  of  fraternity.  lyike  all  the 
articles  of  the  Christian  and  democratic  faith, 
it  is  incapable  of  expression  in  terms  of  the 
passive  intellecfl.  It  is  an  axiom,  but  it  is  an 
axiom  of  faith.  It  is  the  ground  of  our  con- 
fidence that,  in  the  passing  away  of  the  old  social 
order  and  the  discrediting  of  the  authorities  upon 
which  that  order  has  depended  for  social  peace, 
we  are  not  committing  the  world  to  anarchy  and 
the  mere  lawless  and  malignant  strife  of  rival 
egotisms.  It  is  the  reasonable  basis  of  our  ex- 
pedlation  that  an  efficient  government  and  a  law 
of  world-wide  prevalence  can  be  established  on 
the  basis  of  free  and  uncapitulating  wills — the 
consent  of  the  people. 

The  perf ec5t  triumph  of  democracy  is  to  get  the 
knaves  to  consent  to  the  jail  and  rejoice  in  it. 
Meanwhile  the  sincere  and  unsentimental  colli- 
sions of  wills  is  the  purifying  travail  of  the  world. 
And  Evil  is  anything  that  breaks  the  spirit  of  a 
man  and  makes  him  cringe  to  another. 
125 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

VII.  As  the  spiritual  principle  of  democracy 
will  not  permit  the  subjec5lion  of  one  man's  will 
to  another's,  neither  will  it  allow  the  subjedlion 
of  the  individual  will  to  the  sum  total  of  other 
wills.  Democratic  fraternity  is  not  the  confusion 
of  all  private  and  personal  interests  in  a  huge 
and  overwhelming  public  interest  ;  that  is  the 
fraternity  of  the  old  social  order  which  is  passing 
away — it  is  the  fraternity  of  clans  and  races,  the 
fraternity  whose  bond  is  hereditary  and  of  the  flesh. 
The  social  solidarities  whose  cohesive  force  is  the 
instin(5l  of  heredity,  a  kinship  of  blood,  are 
mutually  repulsive  in  proportion  to  the  energy 
of  their  interior  cohesion — they  can  not  there- 
fore produce  a  world-order.  The  irrational  lust 
of  heredity,  the  agglutinousness  of  races,  is  of 
the  essence  of  the  world-problem,  and  it  contains 
in  itself  no  hope  of  solution.  One  must  leave 
father  and  brother  if  one  would  enter  into  the 
fraternity  of  the  modern  spirit.  Democracy  lifts 
its  standard  against  all  the  old  solidarities,  and 
proclaims  a  kinship  that  is  not  of  flesh.  The 
consanquinity  of  democracy  is  not  carnal  but 
spiritual.  It  is  a  transfusion  of  the  blood  of 
126 


The  Axioms 

God,  a  communion  in  the  Eternal  Human.  The 
old  solidarity  must  be  dissolved  in  order  that  the 
opposite  principle,  the  principle  of  unanimity, 
may  be  established. 

VIII.  Democracy  stakes  everything  on  the 
individual,  because  the  individual  is  the  uni- 
versal. The  faith  of  democratic  fraternity  is  that 
if  one  go  deep  enough  into  any  man's  heart  one 
will  find  that  the  passion  of  his  life  issues  out 
of  the  Eternal  Reasonableness  and  Justice  ;  and 
the  travail  of  history  and  experience  is  to  bring 
men  to  unity  and  to  universal  humanity  by  bring- 
ing them  to  themselves.  From  the  beginning  of 
civilization  the  world  has  been  governed  by  the 
mass-man,  the  mob.  The  principle  of  individ- 
uality, though  it  has  been  the  power  of  all  liter- 
ature and  art,  and  the  charm  of  all  chivalry  and 
song,  has  hitherto  played  no  considerable  part  in 
the  affairs  of  state.  Theocracy  can  produce  only 
crowds  and  classes  ;  the  dominance  of  an  external 
law  can  never  produce  individuals.  Mass-man  and 
class-man  are  interchangeable  terms,  and  individ- 
uality and  universality  are  interchangeable  terms. 
127 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

In  the  constitution  of  human  nature,  it  is  impos- 
sible to  accomplish  the  individualization  of  the 
soul  without  universalizing  it.  A  man  can  not 
possibly  have  a  clear,  unitary,  and  persistent  will 
of  his  own  until  he  has  given  himself  unreservedly 
to  a  design  that  is  creative  in  the  service  of 
humanity.  As  one  grows  in  consistency  and 
persistence  of  desire,  one  grows  in  sanity  and 
usefulness.  The  laws  of  the  material  universe 
are  all  drawn  in  favor  of  the  sane  and  integral 
will  of  the  individual — the  eternal  passion  of  the 
heart.  And  they  are  framed  for  the  confusion  of 
all  prurience  and  lust.  The  patience  and  per- 
sistence of  Satan  is  a  Miltonian  myth.  It  would 
seem  that  the  true  and  typical  Prince  of  Sin 
should  be  a  soul  with  a  shattered  and  divided 
will,  not  half  for  good  and  half  for  evil,  but 
half  for  his  crowd  and  half  for  himself — thus 
working  the  damnation  of  his  crowd  and  of 
himself. 

No  man  can  abolish  his  heart's  desire,  tho  he 

may  indeed  be  persuaded  to  the  attempt  by  much 

preaching  of  social  sacrifice  and  by  the  lures  of 

glory.     The  truth  about  the  mass-man  as  evinced 

128 


The  Axioms 

by  his  patriotism  and  class-feeling,  his  sedlarian- 
ism  and  party -spirit,  is  that  he  is  balked  of  his 
individuality  by  his  half-hearted  altruism.  He 
can  not  achieve  an  intelligent  will  or  a  sober 
judgment  because  his  mind  is  divided  between 
the  law  of  his  clan  and  that  of  his  own  soul. 
His  loyalty  becomes  a  sentimentality  or  a  fanati- 
cism, and  his  desire,  a  preposterous  lust  of  gain 
or  glory.  So  the  social  system  of  the  mass- 
man  is  ruled  by  fine  theories — and  sheer  hunger. 
Then  when  the  cry  of  the  fainting  and  crushed 
goes  up,  the  preachers  go  through  the  land  plead- 
ing with  the  people  to  give  their  wills  into  the 
keeping  of  new  sec5ls  and  parties — which  serves 
only  to  increase  the  confusion  and  bewilderment, 
refining  the  fine  sentiments  and  strengthening 
the  secret  lusts. 

IX .  Democratic  philosophy  squarely  j  oins  issue 
with  the  current  conception  of  the  organic  char- 
adter  of  political  society.  The  organic  idea  is 
the  fetish  of  the  age,  the  modem  form  of  the 
ancient  superstition  of  nature-worship.  The 
inevitable  logic  of  the  conception  is  the  efface- 
129 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

ment  of  the  individual,  the  subjec$lion  of  the  part 
to  the  whole.  And  the  conception  requires  for 
its  completion  the  idea  of  a  huge  social  Oversoul 
or  corporate  personality,  an  idea  that  is  utterly 
mystical  and  unreal  when  applied  to  a  local  and 
particular  commonwealth.  It  creates  a  world  of 
warring  gods,  and  commits  the  people  to  the 
dominance  of  mere  physiological  law  and  the 
economic  forces.  For  how  can  a  feature  or  a 
finger  resist  the  whole  bulk  of  a  body?  And 
how  can  one  who  is  only  a  member  of  an  organ- 
ism do  anything  interesting  until  he  has  got 
every  rib  and  tissue  to  agree  to  it  ?  Moral  enter- 
prise becomes  a  problem  for  specialists,  and  agi- 
tation a  disease.  Nobody  can  do  anything  until 
everybody  is  ready  to  do  it.  A  society  that  con- 
tinues to  lie  under  the  spell  of  this  superstition 
is  devoted  to  death — or  a  reign  of  reviving  devil- 
try. For  society  is  not  an  organism;  it  is  an 
organization. 

It  is  indeed  possible  to  say,  by  a  figure  of 

speech,  that  mankind  becomes  an  organism  as  it 

comes  to  its  humanity  and  realizes  its  relationship 

to  God.    This  simile  came  from  the  Man  of 

180 


The  Axioms 

Nazareth,  and  it  has  played  a  great  part  in  the 
history  of  the  Church.  It  serves  to  emphasize 
the  intimacy  of  human  relationships  in  the  realm 
of  the  ideal.  But  it  is  only  a  figure  of  speech, 
and  like  many  another  figure  of  the  same  im- 
mortal speech  it  has  been  wrested  to  false  mean- 
ings. It  has  been  woven  into  the  superstition  of 
transubstantiation.  And  there  is  no  fitter  char- 
a(5lerization  of  this  modern  theory  of  social  or- 
ganism than  to  say  that,  in  its  psychology,  it  is 
a  newer  version  of  high-church  sacramentalism. 
It  hushes  all  questionings  with  its  * '  Hoc  est 
corpus,'^  It  overawes  the  individual  with  the 
mystery  of  majorities — it  is  the  elevation  of  the 
Host — the  adoration  of  the  Mass. 

X.  In  contrast  with  the  dodlrine  of  social 
organism,  democracy  sets  up  its  axiom  of  frater- 
nity— a  fraternity  which  is  not  a  matter  of  hered- 
ity, contiguity,  or  material  interest,  but  depends 
for  its  bond  upon  the  communion  of  men  in  rea- 
sonableness. 

It  is  in  the  depths  of  personality  that  democ- 
racy discovers  its  social  principle — its  principle  of 
131 

"^     ^   OF  T4 

UNIVERSITY 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

universality.  True  it  is,  that  so  long  as  democ- 
racy is  conceived  of  as  a  matter  of  the  wider 
extension  of  the  balloting  practise,  it  contains  no 
necessary  implication  of  universalism  and  no 
negation  of  the  sovereignty  of  separate  and 
mutually  exclusive  states.  For,  as  has  been 
pointed  out,  the  strength  of  the  old  world-gov- 
ernments— even  the  most  despotic — has  been  in 
the  support  given  by  majorities.  They  all  have 
made  their  appeal  to  the  mass-man.  But  in  spite 
of '  the  shallowness  of  political  philosophy  and 
the  general  inarticulateness  of  mankind,  democ- 
racy has  always  meant  in  the  common  sense  of 
the  people  infinitely  more  than  this. 

It  means,  and  has  always  meant  at  bottom, 
not  that  majorities  shall  have  their  unquestioned 
way,  but  rather  the  opposite — to  wit,  that  the 
individual  has  a  right  that  no  masses  of  men 
shall  be  permitted  to  override.  The  quintes- 
sence of  democracy  is  the  legitimizing  of  the 
will  of  the  weakest  man  and  the  championing  of 
his  claim  against  the  fanaticism  of  masses  and 
the  arrogance  of  an  external  and  arbitrary  law. 
It  conceives  of  the  wills  of  the  multitude  as  all 
182 


The  Axioms 

alike  growing  out  of  the  will  of  God,  and  as 
deepening  back  through  the  discipline  of  life  and 
the  attritions  of  human  commerce  to  their  root 
in  the  Eternal  Desire.  It  announces  the  equality 
of  persons,  not  as  a  proposition  in  mathematics 
but  as  a  disclaimer  of  the  human  possibility  of 
fixing  the  gradation  of  deserts. 

The  democratic  principle  does  not  require  that 
men  should  eat  and  sleep  together  or  wear  each 
others'  clothes.  Its  catholic  charity  proceeds 
from  that  which  is  discovered  to  be  the  source  of 
all  law  and  dignity  upon  the  earth — the  immeas- 
urable souls  of  ordinary  men. 

It  is  this  democratic  conception  of  the  final 
authenticity  of  the  individual  desire  that  is  under- 
mining the  old  systems  of  traditional  law,  dis- 
integrating the  solidarity  of  the  great  political 
aggregates,  and  discrediting  the  sovereignty  of 
states.  And  this  is  the  conception  that  gives  to 
democracy  its  charadter  of  universality. 

The  vigor  of  democratic  polity  is  in  democratic 

religion.     So  long  as  the  American  people  would 

make  their  citizenship  a  privilege  as  against  the 

rest  of  the  world,  they  will  be  ridden  over  rough- 

133 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

shod  by  domestic  monopolies.  For  American 
citizenship  is  not  a  privilege;  it  is  a  propagandum. 
The  great  psychological  discovery  of  Chris- 
tianity is  that,  back  of  every  private  and  ego- 
tistical will,  there  is  in  every  man  a  deeper  and 
more  indigenous  will  that  is  public  and  catholic. 
The  claim  of  Christianity — and  so  of  democracy — 
is  that  the  individual  will  is  not  a  bad  thing 
capable  of  being  made  good,  but  a  good  thing 
capable  of  being  made  bad.  In  its  bold  declara- 
tion of  the  legitimacy  of  the  heart's  desire  it 
makes  a  venturesome  appeal  from  that  in  human 
nature  which  is  accidental  and  acquired  to  that 
which  is  deepest  and  most  essential.  '^ '^*^««5^i*« 
I  Now  it  is  the  ancient  conception  of  the  badness 
lof  the  natural  will  that  bases  and  sanations  every 
Ischeme  of  class-privilege  and  national  exclusive- 
Iness.  Given  the  conception  that  the  will  is 
essentially  illegitimate — that  it  is  endowed  with  a 
merely  potential  goodness — and  it  becomes  inevi- 
table that  the  relative  value  of  the  souls  of  men 
will  be  judged  by  a  standard  external  to  them- 
selves. The  demonstration  of  power  will  be 
regarded  as  a  proof  of  right,  economic  success 
184 


The  Axioms 

will  bestow  a  moral  prestige  upon  the  successful, 
and  the  winning  of  a  crown  will  cure  defedl  of 
title.  The  social  law  throughout  its  whole  extent 
will  be  warped  to  a  conformity  with  this  primary 
prepossession,  and  in  spite  of  the  formal  equity 
of  the  law  it  will  be  found  pracflically  impossible 
to  construe  it  otherwise  than  in  the  special  interest 
of  the  prevailing  nations  and  classes. 

It  is  a  total  misconception  of  the  nature  of  class 
and  national  privilege  to  suppose  that  it  can 
rest  and  enjoy  its  spoils  on  a  basis  of  sheer  frank 
aggression  or  good  luck.  The  aggression  would 
be  repressed  as  criminal  and  the  luck  would 
be  canceled  by  law  if  the  people  did  not — in  a 
more  or  less  conscious  way — attribute  to  the 
successful  a  superior  moral  desert.  And  in  spite 
of  the  promptings  of  self-interest,  the  defeated 
can  not,  at  the  bottom  of  their  fearful  hearts,  do 
otherwise  than  attribute  to  the  successful  a 
superior  moral  desert  so  long  as  they  worship  a 
non-human  god,  and  think  of  the  will  as  legitimized 
only  through  conformity  with  an  external  rule  of 
good  and  evil. 

Hence  no  people  can  break  the  reign  of  fatality 
135 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

or  by  any  means  escape  from  the  yoke  of  military 
and  economic  despotism  so  long  as  they  deny  the 
legitimacy  of  the  will  of  the  brownest  or  blackest 
man  on  the  other  side  of  the  world.  They  may 
impose  terms,  but  they  are  bound  to  deal  with 
him  as  an  equal  person;  the  demand  for  his 
unconditional  surrender  is  a  moral  absurdity. 

Under  the  sway  of  state  sovereignty  it  is 
possible  for  a  people  to  claim  and  successfully 
maintain  their  various  class  privileges  and  con- 
ventional deserts  under  the  sovereign  law,  with- 
out claiming  equal  rights  for  an  alien  and 
subjugated  people.  The  subjugated  race  then 
becomes  simply  a  part  of  the  lowest  and  most 
unprivileged  class  in  a  social  order  that  is  pen- 
etrated through  and  through  with  the  spirit  of 
monopoly.  But  it  is  not  possible  for  a  nation  to 
maintain  the  principle  of  the  sovereignty  of  the 
people,  the  principle  of  the  unconventional 
authority  of  the  soul,  without  maintaining  the 
legal  equality  of  all  souls. 

It  is  morally  impossible  for  a  man  to  believe  in 
the  legitimacy  of  his  will,  as  a  thing  existing  in 
its  own  original  right,  apart  from  the  accidents  of 
186 


The  Axioms 

his  social  and  material  condition,  without  con- 
ceding a  like  legitimacy  to  the  wills  of  all  other 
men  of  whatever  condition.  The  principle  of 
individuality  is  thus  the  exa(5l  equivalent  of  the 
principle  of  universality.  If  you  are  protestant 
enough  you  will  be  a  catholic,  and  to  be  a 
thorough-going  American  is  to  be  a  citizen  of  the 
world. 

XI.  We  have  found  that  the  essentials  of  the 
historic  creed  of  Christianity  are  all  implicit  in 
the  mind  of  any  man  that  has  determined  to  make 
the  adventure  of  faith,  determined  to  risk  the 
reasonableness  of  the  cosmic  world,  the  sincerity 
of  God,  and  the  pradlicability  of  the  ideal.  We 
have  found  also  that  the  great  historic  creed  of 
democracy — summed  up  in  the  formula:  L<iberty, 
Equality  and  Fraternity — is  simply  a  more  ethical 
and  pracflical  unfoldment  of  historical  Christian- 
ity, and  that,  like  its  original,  it  is  contained  in 
the  very  fa(5l  of  faith. 

The  axioms  of  these  creeds  are  neither  math- 
ematical nor  what  is  called  scientific.  They  can 
not  be  justified  to  the  criticism  of  moral  cowardice. 
137 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

There  is  no  way  of  proving  their  truth  to  the 
mere  critical  intelligence.  They  are  true  only  in 
case  the  primary  assumptions  of  brave  living  are 
true.  They  are  contingent  axioms — contingent 
upon  the  presumption  that  life  is  worth  while. 
But  they  are  axioms — invincible  and  necessary 
propositions — in  the  sense  that  there  is  no  escape 
from  them.  You  are  bound  to  reckon  with  them. 
You  must  risk  their  being  true  or  else  give  up  the 
affirmation  of  your  own  soul  and  die  a  deserter. 
These  are  the  terms  upon  which  life  upon  the 
earth  must  be  lived.  It  seems  that  God  has  con- 
cealed himself  from  the  searchings  of  the  unven- 
turesome  intelledl.  The  cunningest  dete(5lives, 
ranging  the  earth  for  ten  thousand  years,  have 
not  been  able  to  find  an  indubitable  footprint  of 
him.  Nature  is  beautiful?  Yes,  to  the  brave 
and  free ;  not  otherwise  beautiful.  Kvery  external 
fadl  is  double-faced — you  may  construe  it  in  the 
way  of  love  or  terror. 

Thus  through  the  long  sifting  and  simplifying 

processes   of    history  and  experience  we  have 

reduced    religion    to  its  simplest    terms — have 

found    out    the   quintessence    of   religion,    the 

138 


The  Axioms 

religion  absolute.  It  is  summed  up  in  a  magna- 
nimity of  the  soul  toward  God — a  quick 
response  to  the  divine  compliment  that  has  put 
the  world  in  our  keeping.  God  has  withdrawn 
himself  to  give  us  room.  The  end  of  the  long 
world-process  is  seen  to  be  not  the  assimilation 
of  all  lives  to  an  archetypal  life,  but  the  infinite 
differentiation  of  life  in  the  unity  of  God.  We 
will  not  huddle  any  more,  but  we  strike  hands 
with  free  and  indomitable  spirits  of  all  times  and 
countries. 

There  come  drifting  in  upon  us  the  most  con- 
vincing reassurances.  The  earth  becomes  plastic 
to  the  ideal.  The  languages  fuse  into  a  volapuk 
of  faith.  All  the  historic  struggles  are  seen  to 
have  a  common  issue.  There  is  nothing  any- 
where that  moves  and  sings,  that  is  not  a  part  of 
the  great  epic  of  the  soul. 

The  religion  of  democracy  is  not  new  or  newly 
discovered.  It  is  the  master-motive  of  the  whole 
historic  drama.  The  vidloriousness  of  the  free 
and  fluent  spirit  over  the  hard  elements  of  the 
world  is  the  theme  of  all  enduring  literature  and 
the  energy  of  all  creative  art.  It  is  also  the 
139 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

esoteric  ideal  of  the  social  force  and  fashion, 
the  beau  mo7tde  of  all  ages  and  of  all  lands  ;  for 
the  beau  mojide  has  always  affedled  at  least  to 
measure  men  by  their  courage  and  to  care  little 
for  clothes  and  furniture.  It  never  would  be 
ruled  by  etiquette.  It  makes  fashions,  but  passes 
on  and  does  not  follow  them;  expects  every  man 
to  answer  for  his  love  with  his  life,  and  would 
impoverish  the  soil  and  the  seas  for  the  sake  of 
human  reverence  and  hospitality.  Democracy 
comes  out  of  Nazareth,  but  it  does  not  learn  its 
lessons  from  the  stupid.  It  is  the  lyric  song  of 
ancient  chivalry,  deepened  and  exalted  to  a 
world-symphony.  It  is  the  ideal  of  the  old  nobil- 
ities, sobered  by  science  and  the  economic  fadls. 
It  is  the  romance  of  the  ages,  with  the  senti- 
mentality cleaned  out.  For  the  soul  of  chivalry, 
nobility  and  romance  is  the  contempt  of  laws 
and  of  all  earthly  things,  except  as  they  make 
for  the  freedom  and  dignity  of  persons. 

In  a  word,  there  is  nothing  in  this  world  that  is 

great  or  half -great  that  has  not  been  the  produc5l 

of  the  affirmative  intelledl.    All  the  lines  of  great 

tradition  converge  in   the  heart  of  democracy. 

140 


The  Axioms 

Out  of  the  close  courts  and  cloisters,  the  libraries 
and  galleries  of  the  old  regime,  democracy  in 
perennial  youth  comes  into  the  open  air  to  take 
up  the  burden  of  the  world.  The  old  faiths  die 
and  faith  is  bom — a  faith  now  at  length  grown 
self-conscious  and  aware  of  its  world-revolution- 
ary implications. 

XII.  The  university  has  also  a  creed,  and  as 
the  creed  of  religion  and  politics  issues  out  of  the 
simplest  affirmation  of  faith,  so  it  is  with  the 
creed  of  the  university.  The  modern  university 
is  not  a  school  of  dialec5lics  and  speculative  phi- 
losophy; it  is  related  only  by  contrast  to  the 
Academies  and  Museums  of  antiquity.  The 
history  of  learning  shows  a  clear  breach  be- 
tween the  ancient  and  the  modem  world.  The 
ancient  school  exhausted  the  possibilities  of  the 
passive  and  reflec5live  intelledl,  and  after  the 
intervention  of  the  long,  silent  ages  of  early  Chris- 
tianity, the  university  grew  up,  in  the  nurture 
of  the  Church,  with  an  ideal  in  its  heart  that  is 
the  antithesis  of  the  ancient  scholastic  ideal.  It 
is  true  that  the  medieval  university  used  the 
141 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

books  of  tlie  ancient  world,  and  mimicked  the 
methods  of  the  rhetoricians  and  sophists  of 
Greece,  but  the  world's  intelledlual  ideal  had 
turned  the  crisis  of  a  revolutionary  change. 
Henceforth  the  currents  of  human  thinking  were 
set  in  a  new  diredlion.  Anselm's  **  I  believe — in 
order  that  I  may  understand  ! ' '  was  a  word  that 
could  have  been  spoken  only  by  a  man  of  the 
modern  spirit.     It  marks  the  turning  of  the  tide. 

To  the  ancient  man  thinking  was  an  exercise 
that  had  no  necessary  relation  to  the  fadls  of  the 
universe.  It  was  a  variety  of  mathematics,  the 
algebra  of  ideas.  To  the  man  of  the  modem 
spirit  thinking  is  a  wrestle  with  things  ;  it  is  the 
tense  struggle  of  the  soul  to  get  its  bread  and 
wine  out  of  this  stubborn,  tempting,  denying, 
and  inviting  wilderness  of  nature.  In  the  ancient 
man's  thinking  there  was  no  need  of  moral 
adventure — one  had  but  to  lie  still  and  look  up 
at  the  ceiling  ;  but  the  thinking  that  is  charac- 
teristically modern  begins  and  constantly  con- 
tinues in  the  buoyant,  risky  assumption,  which 
never  can  be  fully  verified  until  the  day  of  judg- 
ment, that  it  is  possible  to  find  the  complete, 

-"        '  142 


The  Axioms 

resplendent  aura  of  the  ideal  in  the  very  dust  of 
the  obdurate  earth. 

In  the  old  world  thinking  was  respedled  for  its 
leisure,  but  in  the  modern  world  for  its  labor. 
Thinking  becomes  the  divine  travail  of  the  soul. 
We  are  led  to  surmise  that  God  made  the  world 
resistant,  and  laid  his  fond  anathema  upon  the 
soil,  in  order  that  in  the  real  and  passionate 
struggle  for  the  things  that  taste  sweet  to  the 
soul,  a  man  might  be  raised  from  creaturehood 
and  become  a  man.  The  old  world  has  be- 
queathed to  us  heads  bereft  of  hands,  and  hands 
bereft  of  heads  ;  and  the  bitterness  of  death  lurks 
equally  in  both  bereavements.  The  old  world 
has  thus  posed  a  problem  which,  in  the  way  of 
its  statement,  has  no  possible  solution.  There 
can  be  no  communion  except  that  of  compassion 
and  patronage  between  creative  men  that  think 
and  human  creatures,  if  such  there  can  be,  that 
just  hew  and  moil.  It  is  a  mad  dream  that  hands 
can  dicflate  terms  to  heads,  and  the  maddest 
dream  of  all  that  hands  can  dispense  with  heads 
and  run  the  world  without  them.'  jThe  only 
effedlive  and  wage-earning  labor  in  the  world  is 
143 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

spiritual — the  toil  of  the  feeling,  knowing, 
creative  spirit. j  The  movement  of  muscles  may 
be  as  painful  as  the  contortions  of  fever  and  as 
useful  as  the  trade- winds  ;  but  it  is  not  human 
labor  unless  it  is  ac5luated  by  free  human  hearts 
and  heads.  The  real  and  economic  values  of  the 
coarsest  and  simplest  work  are  in  the  ideal  forces 
that  go  into  it.  And  if  there  be  anywhere  a  dead 
soul  whose  body  has  been  riveted  to  a  machine, 
his  grievance  is,  not  that  he  gets  less  pay  than 
he  deserves,  but  that  he  is  excluded  from  human 
company  and  deprived  of  the  chance  to  be 
humanly  useful. 

When  a  man  is  reduced  to  the  state  of  a  thing, 
an  analysis  will  show  that  he  makes  no  contribu- 
tion whatever  to  the  civilizing  wealth  of  the 
world.  His  very  person  becomes  merely  an  em- 
bodiment of  the  blind  forces  of  nature.  He 
ceases  to  be  a  social  producer  and  becomes  a 
social  problem. 

The  old  regime  despised  the  brain-worker,  the 
concrete  thinker,  and  gave  its  honors  to  glory- 
seekers — the  soldiers  and  the  priests.  The  rise 
of  the  third  estate  to  the  rule  of  the  modern 
144 


The  Axioms 

world  was  inevitable  in  the  nature  of  things, 
since  those  that  deal  with  realities  are  stronger 
than  those  that  live  in  dreams.  But  that  third 
estate  —  the  merchants,  manufadturers,  civil- 
izers — have  in  turn  submitted  their  minds  to  the 
domination  of  the  lingering  political  and  ecclesi- 
astical superstitions,  and  have  sought  to  recon- 
stitute the  old  order  of  aristocracy  and  social 
abstrac5lion.  So  far  as  this  is  true  of  them,  they 
have  invalidated  their  title  to  the  inheritance  of 
the  earth,  and  it  must  pass  to  stronger  and  more 
venturesome  spirits.  For  as  the  earth  can  never 
be  gripped  by  mechanical  hands,  so  also  it  can 
never  be  ruled  by  self-cultivating  people,  intent 
upon  the  safeguarding  of  their  special  interests 
and  the  saving  of  their  own  souls. 

Both  extremities  of  society  are  dead  at  heart, 
passionless,  and  destitute  of  purpose.  Both  are 
ruled  by  an  external  law — the  one  by  the  law  of 
animal  necessity,  the  other  by  an  intricate  code 
of  customary  pieties,  proprieties,  and  vested 
rights.  The  world  is  not  to  be  saved  by  mimicry 
of  the  rich  or  by  mimicry  of  the  poor.  For 
both  riches  and  poverty  are  solecisms  and  im- 
145 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

pertinences — the  death  of  the  heart's  desire. 
The  rich  and  poor  alike  are  to  be  drawn  back 
by  shame  and  love  into  living  contac5l  with  the 
people  that  feel  and  know  the  world  as  it  really  is. 

Bffedtive  thinking  is  orderly  and  consistent 
feeling.  No  one  has  ever  thought  to  any  pur- 
pose with  his  head  alone;  the  thing  must  be  done 
with  soul  and  body  and  the  whole  passion  of 
life.  The  talk  of  head-work  and  hand-work  is 
the  pedantry  of  drawing-rooms  and  social-reform 
seances.  The  distindlion  is  not  interesting  to 
people  absorbed  in  doing  their  work.  The  man 
that  is  wrestling  his  way  into  the  divine  soul  of 
things  does  not  care  to  soil  his  hands — or  care 
not  to. 

We  are  to  be  delivered  from  the  infidelity  of 
supposing  that  the  world  was  made  with  the 
ache  of  toil  in  it  just  for  the  sake  of  the  ache,  or 
as  if  God  were  a  bungler  and  must  perforce  com- 
mit the  world  to  a  daily  dead  loss  and  misery. 
We  are  bound  to  believe,  if  we  believe  in  life  at 
all,  that  the  necessity  of  working  for  what  we 
want  exists  for  the  quickening  and  clarifying  of 
consciousness,  the  deepening  of  the  sense  of  per- 
146 


The  Axioms 

sonal  existence,  and  the  strengthening  and  em- 
boldening of  the  will.  Nature  holds  us  hard  to 
her  breast,  in  this  straining  and  necessitous  em- 
brace, in  order  that  we  may  feel  the  pulse  of  the 
blood  of  God,  and  come  to  understand  that  the 
Truth  is  out-of-doors  and  not  in  the  recesses  of 
the  brain. 

The  archetypal  laborer,  then,  is  the  man  that 
thinks  and  feels  the  most — the  man  that  can  cor- 
relate, in  the  synthesis  of  his  sanity  and  faith, 
the  largest  number  of  concrete  and  humanly 
relevant  fadls.  From  this  point  of  view  it  be- 
comes apparent  that  the  university-idea  is  of 
commanding  importance  for  the  solution  of  the 
world-problem.  For  the  university — the  strong- 
hold of  the  affirmative  intelledl — is  seen  to  be 
the  source  of  all  human  produdlions — the  creator 
of  material  civilization. 

The  university,  as  it  exists,  bears  to  its  own 
intrinsic  idea  a  relation  like  that  which  a  relig- 
ious sedl  bears  to  the  essential  church-idea. 
The  adlual  institutions  of  the  university  are  the 
detritus  which  has  been  borne  along  in  the  stream 
of  history  from  the  banks  and  shoals  of  the 
147 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

ancient  world.  So  closely  have  the  things 
which  are  its  opposites  been  identified  with  it, 
that  in  coming  to  itself  the  university  must  seem 
to  deny  itself.  To  the  superficial  view  it  has 
seemed  to  stand  for  a  learning  that  receives 
everything  and  affirms  nothing — offering  only  an 
unbounded  opportunity  for  debate;  but  its  real 
mission  is  to  demonstrate  the  futility  of  all  the 
imaginations  and  eruditions  of  mental  abstrac- 
tion, and  to  go  forth  to  the  world  to  communi- 
cate to  the  people  the  quickening  passion  of 
affirmative  ideas.  The  university  is  to  break 
the  immemorial  spell  of  the  passive  intellecfl  and 
to  expose  the  superstition  of  arbitrary  law.  It 
will  declare  that  there  is  nothing  so  certain  in  the 
world  as  life  itself  and  the  chance  to  live  it 
bravely  out. 

The  ways  have  been  prepared,  broad  highways 
of  the  republic  of  art  and  letters  leading  like 
Roman  roads  from  the  centers  of  civilization  to 
the  ends  of  the  world,  for  the  passage  of  the 
university-idea  across  all  the  frontiers  of 
politics. 

The  university  contends  for  the  Humanity  of 
148 


The  Axioms 

God,  the  congeniality  of  the  Mind  of  Nature 
with  the  Mind  of  Man,  and  the  plasticity  of  all 
materials  to  the  human  ideal.  The  beginning  of 
its  world-conquest  waits  only  upon  its  discovery 
of  the  axioms  of  its  own  faith. 


149 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 


CHAPTER  VII 

THK  WORKING-OUT  OF  THK  WORLD   PROBI^KM 

I.  When  under  the  old  regime  the  authority 
of  the  external  law  was  definite  and  unquestioned, 
the  organs  of  that  authority  and  its  material 
forces  stood  like  fac5ts  of  nature,  and  it  was  pos- 
sible for  the  stronger  spirits  to  live  simple, 
straightforward  lives  without  mean  anxiety  or 
bewilderment.  But  when  the  authorities  were 
partially  but  not  wholly  discredited — and  that  is 
the  way  the  case  stands  to-day — everything  be- 
came a  problem,  and  even  the  strongest  men 
lost  their  sure-footed  confidence  and  that  heroic 
clearness  which  is  the  charm  of  the  old  chivalry 
and  romance. 

The    discrediting  of  the  old  authorities  did 

nothing  of  itself  to  hearten  the  hearts  of  men,  and 

in  the  absence  of  faith  in  God  authorities  of  some 

kind  are  necessary.     So  men  have  set  to  work  to 

150 


The  World  Problem 

find  new  authorities  in  place  of  the  old,  and  the 
earth  has  swarmed  with  political  corporations, 
se(5ls,  parties,  and  schools  of  specialists.  The 
large  and  settled  tyranny  has  given  place  to  a 
teeming  host  of  petty  tyrannies,  among  which 
one  may,  in  a  measure,  make  his  choice. 

Those  that  long  for  the  old  heroisms  and  valors 
and  do  not  understand  the  spiritual  promise  of 
democracy  have  proposed  a  retreat  to  the  old 
regime,  and  the  reac5lionary  currents  are  every- 
where in  evidence.  But  it  is  impossible  for  the 
world  to  go  back,  and  the  advocates  of  the  old 
authorities  have  but  increased  the  general  con- 
fusion. 

There  is  but  one  way  to  retrieve  the  dignity  of 
mankind  and  win  back  the  self-respedl  of  the 
world,  and  that  is  to  set  our  faces  steadily  for- 
ward to  finish  the  work  that  our  fathers  began. 
Society  will  be  reintegrated  and  the  old  personal 
faiths  will  come  back  a  thousand  times  renewed 
when  we  shall  have  courage  to  accept  without 
flinching  the  whole  program  of  the  great  spiritual 
revolution.  It  is  too  late  to  bother  with  dogmas 
in  detail;  the  time  has  come  to  lay  the  ax  at  the 
151 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

root  of  the  tree  and  destroy  the  very  principle  of 
dogmatism. 

If  there  is  any  such  thing  as  the  logic  of  history 
it  is  time  now  to  make  trial  of  the  sovereignty  of 
the  people.  As  a  fine  sentiment  it  has  been 
ineffec5lual;  as  a  prac5lical  program  it  is  still  the 
open  door  of  hope.  Nobody  has  a  right  to  expedl 
that  humanity,  unfettered  and  unscared,  will  ruin 
the  framework  of  the  world.  At  all  events,  these 
mercantile  and  military  corporations  and  the 
spawning  sec5ls,  parties,  and  schools  are  a  poor 
substitute  for  God  and  lyaw.  We  have  no  choice 
but  to  go  on. 

II.  The  integration  of  universal  society  fol- 
lows upon  the  integration  of  the  individual  soul. 
The  soul  has  been  shattered  into  fragments 
because  the  will  has  been  discredited  by  the  over- 
whelming aspecfls  of  mechanical  law.  Thus  the 
real  desire  of  the  heart  has  been  discouraged,  and 
men  have  occupied  themselves  not  with  the  things 
they  would  do  but  the  things  they  suppose  they 
must. 

Since  every  man  is  tangent  to  the  universe  at 
152 


The  World  Problem 

just  one  point,  his  happiness  consists  in  his  doing 
one  thing  at  a  time  and  doing  it  exceptionally 
well.  Specialism  is  the  law  of  creative  life  when 
specialism  means  the  grip  of  the  creative  spirit 
of  a  man — ^laying  hold  of  the  world  in  his  own 
peculiar  way.  But  specialism  is  the  death  of 
art  and  joy  when  it  is  negative  and  compulsory — 
the  subjugation  of  the  spirit  under  the  yoke  of 
economic  necessity.  We  have  had  a  plague  of 
mechanicalized  specialists.  Everywhere  we  see 
only  fractional  people — people  that  can  do  a 
trick.  The  world  is  tired  of  carpenters,  clergy- 
men, pedagogists,  and  all  manner  of  experts  and 
conventioners  who  see  things  with  the  bias  of 
their  trade.  The  earth  is  barren,  and  the  people 
starve  for  the  lack  of  catholic  and  cosmic-tem- 
pered men.  Society  will  grow  fluent,  expressive, 
spiritual,  and  the  arts  will  flourish  when  the 
dodlors,  lawyers,  and  ditchers  are  what  they  are 
because  they  choose  to  be. 

The  faith  that  legitimizes  the  heart's  desire  is 

bound  to  produce  a  new  and  more  integral  kind 

of  man,  and  that  fadl  is  the  main  reliance  of  the 

democratic  program.     Specialism  of  the  mechan- 

153 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

ical  and  regimentated  kind  is  at  war  with  the 
modern  spirit  and  belongs  to  the  old  regime.  It 
tends  toward  caste  and  status,  and  destroys  the 
freedom  and  vitality  of  society.  When  the  old 
regime  was  in  its  prime  every  man's  specialism 
was  prescribed  by  statute  law;  now  it  is  pre- 
scribed and  enforced  by  naked,  economic  law;  that 
is  the  whole  extent  of  our  achievement  up  to  date. 

So  long  as  every  man  is  a  partialist  and  a  par- 
ticularist  it  is  impossible  to  solve  any  social 
problem,  because  it  is  impossible  to  get  a  social 
and  comprehensive  view  of  any  problem.  The 
first  requisite  of  reform  is  men  that  choose  their 
own  crafts  and  put  the  spirit  of  individuality  into 
them.  To  break  the  spell  of  irrational  economics 
ii  the  prime  need  is  poets,  artists  and  lovers  of  ffie 
world.  The  organization  of  a  democratic  cafiiol- 
icism  waits  upon  the  coming  of  such  men.  The 
preachers,  politicians  and  savants  are  inefie<5live 
because  they  are,  or  seem  to  be,  for  the  most  part 
hired  men  retained  m  a  special  interest. 

We  shall  rediscover  the  intrinsic  versatility  of 
the  human  spirit.  In  the  great  days  of  medieval 
art  the  artists  were  painters,  sculptors,  builders, 
154 


The  World  Problem 

makers  of  roads,  and  movers  of  mountains;  so  it 
shall  be  again — and  more  so.  A  master  of  any 
trade  is  master  of  all. 

III.  The  discovery  that  Americanism  is  the 
quintessence  of  historical  Christianity,  that  the 
creed  of  the  Church  is  one  with  that  of  demo- 
cratic society,  is  bound  to  furnish  the  substance 
of  a  world-moving  evangel.  But  it  is  a  gospel 
that  can  not  be  carried  around  the  world  by 
clergymen  or  politicians.  The  old  shibboleths 
of  professional  religion  and  professional  politics 
can  not  be  translated  into  a  universal  irenicon. 
The  very  names  of  religion  and  politics  are  names 
of  confusion  and  discord.  It  is  impossible  for  pro- 
fessional religion  to  sanc5lify  politics,  and  equally 
impossible  for  politics  to  sanify  professional  relig- 
ion. The  distin<5lion  between  the  two  stands  as 
the  immemorial  monument  of  the  original  sin  and 
schism  of  the  mind  —  its  inveterate,  barren  a 
priorism  and  a  posteriorism,  forever  bullying  the 
human  heart  either  with  the  terror  of  ghostly 
abstractions  or  the  bald  brutality  of  unrational- 
ized  fadls.  There  is  no  hope  of  civilization  or  of 
155 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

social  order,  save  in  the  rise  and  dominance  of 
the  affirmative  intelle(5l.  It  is  the  mission  of  the 
university — the  Democratic  Catholic  Church — to 
meet  this  emergency  of  the  world.  It  must  pro- 
vide new  catagories  of  thinking  and  a  new  vocab- 
ulary of  revolution. 

The  university  must  stand  to  represent  the 
sovereignty  of  the  people.  It  will  derive  its  faith, 
its  world-conquering  spirit  from  the  great  tradi- 
tion of  the  historic  Church.  But  the  forms  of  its 
expression  will  be  the  historical  forms  of  politics. 
This  is  no  inspiration  of  prophecy;  if  it  is  any- 
thing it  is  psychology — the  science  of  the  spiri- 
tual processes  of  history.  No  one  is  qualified  to 
say  when  or  under  what  stress  of  moral  com- 
pulsion the  reintegration  of  society  will  be 
effected;  but  it  requires  no  special  gift  to  see  that 
when  it  does  come  to  pass,  the  social  institution 
that  has  sought  to  represent  democracy  apart 
from  the  concrete  fadts  and  the  institution  that 
has  sought  to  achieve  the  fa(5l  without  the 
spirit  will  be  available — the  one  as  the  spirit 
and  the  other  as  the  form  of  that  other  and 
correlating  institution  whose  genius  it  is  to  ex- 
156 


The  World  Problem 

press  the  pradlical  power  of  the  God-confident 
intelledl. 

The  identification  of  Ainericanism  with  quint- 
essential  Christianity  is  the  disclosure  of  the 
meaning  and  mission  of  America.  But  that 
meaning  and  mission  can  never  be  expressed  and 
carried  out  in  a  social  order  until  it  shall  be 
clearly  conceived  and  uttered  in  the  precipitating 
words  of  intelledl.  This  is  the  work  of  the  uni- 
versity. When  it  shall  realize  the  terms  of  its 
own  charter  and  so  be  capable  of  uttering  effec- 
tual words  it  will  perceive  that  its  charter  is 
nothing  other  than  the  creeds  of  Christianity  and 
democracy,  and  it  will  proceed  to  the  interpreta- 
tion of  that  charter  for  the  enfranchisement  of 
the  people. 

IV.  As  the  great  political  parties  in  the 
United  States  have  been  formed  simply  by  the 
establishment  in  every  ward  of  every  city  of  the 
standard  of  a  definite  social  ideal — so  it  must  be 
with  the  institution  of  a  democratic  Catholicism. 
The  demoralization  of  the  old  parties  furnishes 
the  opportunity.  The  fac5l  that  the  old  parties 
157 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

have  both  ceased  to  represent  the  old  social 
ideals  clears  the  way  for  a  new  social  ideal 
that  shall  synthesize  and  transcend  the  old  con- 
ceptions. 

The  decadence  of  the  old  parties  does  not 
prove  the  corruption  of  the  American  people  or 
their  abandonment  of  ideal  aims.  It  indicates, 
on  the  contrary,  a  general  consciousness  that  the 
old  bottles  can  not  contain  the  new  wine.  The 
people  have  left  the  old  parties  to  the  politicians 
because  they  are  becoming  aware  of  the  futility 
of  that  party-spirit  which  once  engaged  their  in- 
terest. Everywhere  there  is  restlessness.  It  is 
the  rising  of  a  great  hope  and  the  gathering  of 
a  great  determination.  The  need  of  the  hour  is 
a  definite  social  ideal  that  is  true  both  to  the  ex- 
perience of  the  past  and  the  hope  of  the  future — 
an  ideal,  historic  and  evolutionary.  It  must  be 
seen  to  be  no  invention  of  moralists,  but  the 
irresistible  logic  of  the  history  of  the  world. 
And  it  must  be  thoroughgoing  and  worth 
while;  the  greatest  thing  will  be  the  most  prac- 
ticable. Such  an  ideal,  definite,  morally  com- 
manding and  logically  inevitable,  is  the  ideal  of 
158 


The  World  Problem 

a  catholic  democracy  to  be  carried  around  the 
world  by  the  university,  in  the  spirit  of  his- 
toric Christianity  and  in  the  ways  of  pradlical 
politics. 

V.  The  university,  as  it  plants  its  standard 
in  town-halls  and  church-buildings,  or  in  barns 
and  wigwams,  from  ward  to  ward  and  from  town 
to  town,  will  not  summon  the  local  assemblies  to 
the  general  renovation  of  the  world;  it  will  not 
call  people  away  from  their  real  and  present  in- 
terests to  imaginary  interests  on  the  other  side  of 
the  earth;  nor  will  it  seek  to  make  universal  the 
provincialisms  of  New  York,  or  of  I^ondon,  or 
St.  Petersburg.  Its  endeavor  will  run  in  the  op- 
posite diredlion.  It  will  bring  the  universal 
humanities  to  a  focus  in  every  village  of  the 
prairies,  producing  catholic  individualities  and 
cosmopolitan  cities  even  where  the  people  live 
in  sod- houses  or  adobe  huts. 

The  university  will  rally  the  people  to  a  com- 
manding creed.  It  will  accomplish  a  clear  and 
pradlical  working  organization  for  the  carrying 
out  of  that  creed  in  the  forms  of  law  and  govern- 
159 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

ment.  It  will  stand  in  every  eledloral  precindl 
as  a  political  primary  that  never  adjourns.  But 
its  organization,  like  that  of  the  political  parties 
in  their  best  estates,  will  be  fluent  and  responsive 
to  the  demands  of  the  people.  It  will  not  consti- 
tute an  authority  apart  from  the  common  life — 
there  will  be  no  oaths  or  shibboleths,  no  free- 
masonries  or  party-loyalties. 

The  apostolate  of  democracy  must  be  made  up 
of  world-tempered  men  who  can  pass  from 
metropolis  to  hamlet,  and  from  country  to  coun- 
try— at  home  in  all  lands — ^stirring  the  stagnan 
pools  of  provincialism  and  freshening  them  with 
the  universal  air.  There  can  be  no  clergy-caste  ; 
the  Church  of  democracy  must  be  governed  by 
the  laity,  and  must  draw  its  material  support  from 
the  free  contributions  of  the  people.  The  time 
will  come  when  the  people  will  pour  into  the 
treasuries  of  the  university  what  they  now 
give  grudgingly  to  the  sedlarian  churches,  poUt- 
ical  parties,  privately  supported  colleges,  and  the 
innumerable  futile  charities — so  that  the  material 
establishments  of  the  democratic  ideal  may  exceed 
the  dignity  and  splendor  of  medieval  Catholicism. 
160 


The  World  Problem 

But,  for  a  while,  doubtless  the  ministers  and 
builders  of  the  university  must  like  to  live  hard. 
As  the  institution  of  the  new  cathoUcism 
grows  to  its  prevalence  and  success,  it  will  accom- 
plish  what  is  true  and  democratic  in  the  vague 
hopes  of  college-settlements  and  university- 
exMlM?5^'m5vanehts.  It  will  gfet  the  better  o! 
the  politicians,  and  will  probably  take  out  of  their 
hands  the  control  of  the  whole  system  of  public 
education.  Its  local  organization,  like  that  of 
the  political  parties,  will  have  definite  territorial 
limits,  and  will  no  doubt  keep  its  census  of 
souls,  or  parish-register,  with  all  of  the  pains- 
taking that  is  pradlised  by  Tammany  Hall,  so 
that  every  child  that  is  born  shall  have  a  social 
status  and  a  name  to  be  known  by.  The  secret 
of  Tammany  is  its  utter  humanism — it  keeps 
close  to  the  concrete.  It  prevails  over  the 
scholars-in-politics  and  the  ecclesiastical  crusades, 
and  deserves  to  prevail,  because  it  has  renounced 
abstra(5lion  and  adls  in  the  power  of  the  affirma- 
tive mind.  The  political  organizations  of  which 
it  is  the  type  can  never  be  weakened  by  preach- 
ing or  repressed  by  law.  They  must  be  super- 
161 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

seded  by  that  which  alone  deserves  to  supersede 
them — to  wit,  a  social  organization  whose  human- 
ism is  wider  and  more  affirmative  than  their  own. 

The  new  Catholicism  must  seek  to  make  every 
parish  a  little  world  pulsing  with  the  life  of  the 
nations  and  the  ages — a  comradeship  in  what  is 
great  and  fine,  and  an  intimate  neighborhood 
wherein  men  know  and  help  each  other. 

After  the  religious  fanaticisms  are  a  little 
dulled  it  may  be  possible  for  the  people  to  under- 
stand and  rejoice  in  those  two  great  rituals  which 
have  stood  for  ages  to  celebrate  the  polar  prin- 
ciples of  democracy  —  baptism  and  the  holy 
communion  of  the  common  bread — the  symbol 
of  individuality  and  the  symbol  of  universality. 
Tho,  indeed,  we  could  even  do  without  the 
symbols,  if  necessary,  after  we  had  got  a  measure 
of  the  substance. 

**^  VI.  In  a  word,  the  free  association  of  the 
people,  institutionalized  in  the  university,  must 
supersede  the  sovereignty  of  the  state  as  the  rep- 
\  resentative  of  the  original  and  essential  vitalities 
K      of   society.      This   can   be    accomplished    only 


The  World  Problem 

through  a  moral  and  intelledlual  volte  face — a 
social,  spiritual  experience  which  is  the  ethical 
reality  that  has  been  sometimes  foreshadowed, 
but  oftener  travestied,  in  sedlarian  theories  of 
conversion.  It  consists  in  the  appreciation  of 
the  fadl  that  the  regime  of  justice  and  liberty 
becomes  possible  only  when  the  social  center 
of  gravity  falls  not  in  this  ac5lual  world  but  in 
the  infinitely  resourceful  world  of  the  yet-to-be- 
accomplished  ideal,  and  that  it  is  impossible  to 
break  the  yoke  of  the  military  and  economic 
power  until  the  people  understand  that  society 
is  society  before  it  is  a  police-force  or  an  indus- 
trial partnership.  The  growing  appreciation 
of  the  subordinate  and  conventional  charadler 
of  all  legal  and  political  institutions  will  make  it 
possible  for  the  university,  in  its  progress  around 
the  world,  to  efface  by  a  gradual  but  irresistible 
process  the  political  frontiers. 

The  ministry  of  the  university  opens  a  world- 
regenerating  career  to  those  that  love  the  great 
adventures  of  the  ideal.  They  will  not  imagine 
that  things  can  be  accomplished  with  ease  because 
they  are  morally  inevitable  and  lie  in  the  broad 
163 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

track  of  the  logical  movement  of  history.  His- 
tory swirls  and  sags,  but  does  not  move  forward 
without  risk  and  loss.  And  the  men  that  are  to 
do  the  things  that  are  to  be  done  must  be  trial- 
tempered  paladins  of  faith,  broad-shouldered  in 
the  soul,  and  big  enough  to  press  hard  on  the 
gate  for  the  turning  of  the  hinge  of  universal 
history. 

VII.  In  the  light  of  the  new  orientation  of  the 
mind  which  this  ministry  will  accomplish  the 
insoluble  social  problems  will  grow  soluble.  The 
seemingly  irreducible  contradictions  will  yield  to 
a  process  of  synthesis.  Neither  socialism  nor  inr 
dividualism  will  prevail,  but  both — in  a  sense 
different  from  either.  And  so  of  imperialism  and 
anti-imperialism,  capitalism  and  laborism,  con- 
servatism and  radicalism,  and  so  on  through  the 
catalog  of  class-controversies. 

It  must  be  borne  in  mind  that  the  cause  of  the 
constant  tendency  of  men  to  divide  into  two  parties 
on  every  social  issue  is  the  prevalence  of  the  pas- 
sive intellect:  and  the  attempt  to  institutionalize  a 
social  rule  that  shall  be  superior  to  all  individuals. 
164 


The  World  Problem 

Now  democracy  does  not  deny  the  existence  of 
a  superior  authority,  social  and  universal,  but  it 
declares  that  the  authority  lies  in  the  heart  of 
the  Eternal  Man,  and  can  not  be  institution- 
alized upon  the  earth.  It  rests  its  confidence  of 
the  pradlicability  of  civilization  upon  the  self- 
realization  of  men,  and  their  quickening  and 
deepening  sense  of  participation  in  the  Eternal 
Humanity.  But  everywhere  throughout  the 
world  to-day  the  people  are  still  ashamed  of  their 
own  souls  and  dare  not  strive  frankly  for  the 
things  they  care  about.  It  always  has  been  the 
egotistic  interest  of  the  upper  classes — the  classes 
that  have  done  the  thinking  and  furnished  the 
moral  theories — to  perpetuate  this  state  of  aifairs. 
And  never,  in  any  considerable  numbers  at  once, 
have  they  escaped  from  the  temptation.  The 
denial  of  the  authority  of  the  human  ideal  has 
made  it  possible  to  clothe  with  spiritual  sandlions 
that  power  of  the  state  which  has  been,  and  is 
to-day,  the  bulwark  of  all  social  privilege.  And 
as  the  authority  of  the  state  has  always  had  a 
dual  expression — transcendentalism  on  the  one 
hand  and  brute  force  on  the  other — so  every 
165 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

social  interest  has  presented  two  aspedls  to  the 
passive  and  devitalized  minds  of  the  people,  as 
it  has  been  looked  at  from  the  standpoint  of 
traditional  theories,  or  from  that  of  the  present 
and  pressing  fadls.  This  schism  is,  as  has  been 
already  pointed  out,  a  psychologic  necessity 
under  the  regime  of  the  passive  intelle(5l.  It 
corresponds  to  the  interminable  scholastic  con- 
troversy between  a  priori  and  a  posteriori  logic. 
Both  logical  methods  are  utterly  futile  and  life- 
destroying,  and  would  be  seen  to  be  so  if  the 
slaves  of  the  passive  intelle6l  had  not  been  gener- 
ally saved  to  some  measure  of  sanity  by  their 
unconscious  confusion  of  logical  methods. 

And  if  party-spirit  has  not  utterly  ruined  the 
world  it  is  because  the  maddest  of  a  priorists  and 
a  posteriorists  have  usually  had  some  flicker  of 
light  from  that  afi&rmative  intelledl  which  is  the 
creative  flame  in  every  man,  and  will  not  finally 
allow  the  array  of  reasons  and  the  appearances 
of  things  utterly  to  overwhelm  the  heart's  desire. 

The  essence  of  Americanism  is  the  conception 
that  all  intelle<5lual  and  moral  authority  inheres 
in  the  living  body  of  humanity  as  it  faces  its 
166 


The  World  Problem 

daily  problem — while  the  old  and  undemocratic 
regime  undertakes  to  set  up  a  moral  and  intel- 
le(5lual  authority  outside  of  and  above  the  living 
persons  of  men. 

The  cause  of  the  world's  demoralization  is  the 
establishment  of  moral  authorities,  and  the  ex- 
planation of  the  general  weakness  of  intelledl  is 
to  be  found  in  the  intellecflual  authorities.  Try 
as  he  may,  a  man  can  not  altogether  escape  from 
his  own  soul  or  from  its  native  perceptions  of 
what  is  good  and  true;  consequently  the  rever- 
ence for  an  external  authority  is  sure  to  destroy 
his  integrity  and  commit  his  life  to  a  double 
standard. 

Democracy  clears  the  ground  by  abolishing  all 
authorities,  except  the  authority  of  God  as  real- 
ized in  living  men.  It  does  not  abolish  moral 
and  intelledlual  forces;  on  the  contrary,  it  gives 
them  an  incalculable  reinforcement  through  the 
gains  of  moral  and  intelledlual  integrity. 

A  moral  authority,  as  distinguished  from  a  con- 
vincing moral  influence,  is  simply  an  intellecflual 
authority  under  a  more  pretentious  name.  And 
the  gist  of  all  intellecftual  authority  is  the 
167 


The  Afifirmative  Intellect 

attempt  to  institutionalize  a  Truth  apart  from  the 
experienced  fac5ls  and  forces  of  the  world.  Now 
democracy  is  the  return  to  the  physical  and  spirit- 
ual concrete — the  real  and  material  fadls  and 
forces.  It  organizes  its  material  forces  to  defeat 
and  destroy  every  obstacle  that  seems  to  oppose 
itself  to  the  common  health  and  sanity.  If  mis- 
takes are  made  and  prophets  are  killed,  that  is  all 
in  the  way  of  the  redemption  of  the  world.  It  is 
the  business  of  prophets  to  take  risks.  But  legal 
hangings,  punitive  expeditions,  and  so  on,  would 
soon  come  to  an  end  if  the  self-righteousness  and 
the  meritricious  moral  indignation  were  cleaned 
out  of  the  law.  A  democratic  society  will  be 
content  with  the  defeat  of  its  adversaries;  it  will 
not  care  to  destroy  them.  It  will  know  how  to 
forgive.  And  no  democratic  man  or  company  of 
such  men  could  ever  consent  to  take  a  human 
life  without  risking  their  own. 

VIII.  The  democratic  revolution  can  never  be 

understood  by  mechanical  minds — by  those  that 

think    with    their    heads    only.     There    is    no 

explaining  of  the  program  of  the  new  era  to  those 

168 


The  World  Problem 

that  suppose  that  the  world  is  ordered  by  theories. 
It  is  necessary  to  understand  that  society  is  gov- 
erned by  vital  impulses,  and  that  the  diredlion  of 
these  impulses  depends  upon  the  primary  faiths 
of  the  people.  The  changes  proposed  are  not 
reformatory;  they  are  revolutionary.  They  are 
not  mechanical,  but  quasi-chemical.  They  do 
not  consist  in  the  rearrangement  of  existing 
materials,  but  in  the  creation  of  new  substances. 
It  is  not  a  question  of  the  repeal  of  this  law 
and  the  enac5lment  of  that.  The  revolution  goes 
to  the  root  of  the  matter,  and  reconceives  the 
whole  legal  system  from  the  ground  up.  New 
laws  are  indeed  to  be  made,  and  old  ones  set 
aside;  immense  strudlural  changes  are  to  take 
place.  But  these  changes  would  be  entirely 
ineffedlual,  would  be  canceled  or  wrested  to  the 
interests  of  privilege,  if  they  were  to  be  accom- 
plished by  mere  argument  and  agitation  while 
the  spirit  of  the  law  remained  unchanged.  They 
are  to  be  made  effedlual  only  by  bringing  to  bear 
new  social  forces  in  a  new  and  aJffirmative  faith. 

IX.  The  new  spirit  may  be  pradlically  appre- 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

hended  by  keeping  in  mind  the  three  following 
propositions,  which  have  been  already  suggested 
in  detail,  but  which  must  be  gathered  up  and 
taken  together  for  the  sake  of  the  light  they 
shed  upon  each  other. 

'In  the  first  place,  then,  the  old  social  spirit 
regards  the  heart's  desire  of  the  individual  as 
essentially  bad,  however  capable  of  achieving 
virtue;  while  the  new,  on  the  contrary,  regards 
it  as  essentially  good  and  legitimate,  however 
capable  of  corruption.  This  is  the  primary 
principle  of  democracy.  It  gives  pradlical  sense 
to  the  assumption  that  an  ordinary  man  has  vital 
relation  to  the  infinite,  and  it  justifies  the  rule  of 
the  afiirmative  intellecfl.  Its  assertion  marks  the 
transition  of  human  consciousness  from  the  status 
Bof  creatureliness  to  that  of  creativeness. 

Secondly,  the  spirit  of  the  old  order  aims  to 
ive  every  man  his  deserts  according  to  the  defi- 
[nitions  of  an  external  law,  while  the  aim  of 
democracy  is  to  give  every  man  the  utmost 
chance  to  live  a  creative  life.  The  only  equality 
''Sown  to  the  old  order,  even  in  its  most  liberal 
and  modern  aspedls,  is  an  equality  ^' under  the 
170 


The  World  Problem 

law. ' '  Its  theoretical  operation  is  to  give  every 
man  an  equal  chance  to  become  the  master  of 
other  men:  Practically  this  is  impossible,  and  the 
principle  of  "equality  under  the  law"  produces 
and  maintains  grosser  inequalities  than  those  that 
existed  in  the  more  ancient  regime  of  pure  status. 
The  new  spirit,  on  the  other  hand,  proclaims  an 
equality  that  is  above  the  law.  It  makes  the  law 
the  instrument  of  an  equality  that  is  more  august 
than  the  law  itself.  It  affords  no  countenance  to 
egotistic  ambition  or  to  envy,  and  has  no  prizes 
for  the  exceptionally  good  and  no  punishment 
for  the  exceptionally  bad.  The  only  goodness 
that  it  recognizes  is  creativeness,  and  that  is  its 
own  reward  in  vital  strength  and  competency. 
And  it  knows  of  no  bad  but  consumptiveness, 
which  is  its  own  punishment  in  loss  of  life.  It 
has  no  scale  to  measure  the  relative  value  of 
services — counts  the  tunneling  of  mountains  and 
the  cutting  of  isthmuses  fine,  but  no  finer  than 
any  other  fine  deed.  It  knows  nothing  of  natural 
or  creaturely  rights — as  the  rights  to  take  toll,  to 
live  on  the  labor  of  others,  or  to  make  a  nuisance 
of  one's  self;  it  recognizes  only  spiritual  or  crea- 
171 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

tive  rights.  And  these,  in  all  persons  under  all 
changing  circumstances,  are  absolutely  equal.  It 
is  not  concerned  with  abstradl  proprietary  rights, 
but  gives  all  its  respedl  to  the  concrete  personal 
right  to  hold  and  vitalize  as  many  brute  things  as 
one  can.  It  has  no  prejudice  against  large 
possessions  or  small  ones,  but  it  protests  at  sight 
of  a  beggar  or  a  magnate — a  man  that  is  servile 
and  envious,  and  a  man  that  lives  by  the  baseness 
and  hunger  of  other  men. 

The  third  proposition  is  that,  whereas  the  old 
regime  starts  with  law  and  order  and  strives  for 
liberty,  the  new  begins  with  liberty  and  strives 
for  law  and  order.  So  long  as  the  agencies  of 
law — executive,  legislative,  and  judicial — consti- 
tute the  nerve-center  of  national  life,  and  the 
people  have  no  consciousness  of  national  or  social 
existence  outside  the  machineries  of  government, 
no  preaching  or  praying  can  possibly  prevent 
their  settling  every  social  question  from  the  state- 
supporting  standpoint.  The  party  that  is  most 
bent  on  the  aggrandizement  of  government  will 
always  seem  to  be  the  safest  and  will  always  carry 
the  day.  There  will  be  little  chance  of  releasing 
172 


The  World  Problem 

the  incalculable,  creative  energies  of  liberty, 
lyiberty,  the  opportunity  to  live  one's  own  life 
according  to  one's  genius,  will  be  regarded,  not  as 
the  source  of  law  and  spring  of  civilization,  but  as 
something  that  the  law  allows,  within  ever  narrow- 
ing limits.  It  will  be  a  legal  franchise,  not  an 
inalienable  right.  On  the  other  hand,  when  the 
people  shall  have  established  a  standing-ground 
for  their  national  and  social  life  in  aloofness 
from  the  machinery  of  government,  they  will  be 
able  to  regulate  their  affairs  in  the  interests  of 
liberty. 

The  tyranny  of  the  high-seas  would  be  insup- 
portable, and  anything  could  be  done  against  the 
crew  and  passengers  on  the  plea  of  safety  for 
the  ship,  if  there  were  no  shore  where  explana- 
tions are  demanded.  Democracy  proposes  to 
establish  a  seaboard  and  a  serene  distri(5l  court, 
and  to  set  limits  to  that  raging  main  of  public 
policy  on  which  the  ships  of  state  are  forever 
tossing,  with  shipmasters  calling  for  more  power 
and  more  law.  But  this  is  the  lowest  statement 
of  the  case.  The  truth  is  that  the  new  regime 
will  work  a  complete  revolution  in  the  law  from 
173 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

top  to  bottom,  shifting  the  point  of  view  from 
conventional  to  primordial  rights. 

It  is  not  at  all  a  question  of  the  width  of  the 
scope  of  government  and  law.  That  is  where  the 
controversy  between  the  individualists  and  the 
socialists  raises  a  false  issue.  A  democratic 
society  may  enacft  what  are  called  sumptuary  laws 
and  may  enter  into  the  minutiae  of  social  life, 
making  the  people's  clothes  and  warming  their 
houses,  or  it  may  do  none  of  these  things. 
These  are  secondary  matters,  and  they  can  not  be 
settled  in  a  democratic  sense  until  they  are 
regarded  from  the  democratic  point  of  view. 
The  question  that  democracy  asks  concerning 
any  proposed  extension  of  the  sphere  of  govern- 
ment and  law  is  this  :  Will  this  new  exercise  of 
compulsion  increase  the  opportunities  of  liberty  ? 

X.  There  is  no  validity  in  the  distindlion  be- 
tween industries  that  are  in  their  nature  public  and 
those  that  are  private.  All  produ<5tive  work  is 
in  its  nature  both  public  and  private — private,  as 
being  the  expression  of  the  lives  of  individuals; 
and  public,  as  being  diredled  toward  the  general 
174 


The  World  Problem 

welfare.  For  any  work  that  is  not  dire(5led  to- 
ward the  general  welfare  has  no  right  to  any 
social  recognition  whatever.  Being  a  nuisance, 
it  deserves  simply  to  be  abated.  The  workable 
distinction  lies  between  those  operations  that  are 
of  so  elementary  and  necessitous  a  kind  that  they 
can  be  reduced  to  routine,  like  the  alimentary 
and  respiratory  habits  and  unconscious  reflex 
acftions  of  the  body,  and,  on  the  other  hand,  the 
adlivities  that  are  distindlly  creative  and  human. 
But  the  coarser,  mechanical  interests  run  up  into 
and  interpenetrate  the  finer  interests.  And  the 
finer  interests  run  down  into  the  coarser  inter- 
ests in  such  manner  that  it  is  impossible  to  draw 
a  line  between  the  two  in  any  other  than  an 
expediential  and  temporary  way.  All  that  can  be 
said  is  that,  as  the  individual  must  not  be  ruled 
by  his  stomach  on  pain  of  the  forfeiture  of  his 
humanity,  so  a  society  of  individuals  must,  if 
they  would  be  free  and  human,  insist  upon  con- 
trolling the  governmental  routine  from  a  vantage- 
ground  of  the  humanities. 

Democracy  is  the  discovery  that  a  human  life 
can  not  be  lived  by  all  of  us  or  any  of  us  so  long 
175  . 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

as  we  lie  passive  under  the  hand  of  habit  and 
necessity.  So  long  as  the  alimentary  problem  is 
studied  from  the  alimentary  point  of  view  it 
remains  insoluble.  Democracy  therefore  sets  its 
feet  firmly  in  the  sphere  of  the  creative  spirit, 
determining  to  die  cheerfully  rather  than  give 
up  that  ground.  Government  becomes  a  tool  of 
the  ideal.  All  laws  are  to  be  repealed  that  have 
cramped  the  creative  powers  of  the  people.  No 
man  can  have  any  real  and  creative  interests 
against  the  creative  life  of  humanity.  It  is  for 
no  man's  good  that  he  should  be  allowed  to  stand 
in  the  way  of  civilization.  The  rich — so  far  as 
they  are  parasitic — are  wronged  by  their  rights. 
Democracy  owes  it  to  their  souls  to  divest  their 
vested  interests.  All  fraternal  consideration  they 
shall  certainly  have.  But  material  compensa- 
tion?— that  is  possible  only  in  a  very  limited 
sense.     Mainly  it  is  absurd  and  impossible. 

CAll  interests  are  parasitic  that  involve  a  cur- 
tailment of  the  produdlive  powers  of  the  people. 
Society  is  a  vast  cooperative  concern.  But  as 
it  stands  with  its  divine  head  in  the  heavens  and 
its  feet  in  the  dust  and  mud,  there  must  needs 
176 


The  World  Problem 

be  two  fairly  distinct  spheres  of  its  cooperation — 
the  sphere  of  Hberty  and  love,  and  that  of  com- 
pulsion and  law.  The  regime  which  is  passing 
away  has  dominated  the  former  from  the  standing- 
ground  of  the  latter;  it  has  subordinated  the  crea- 
tive spontaneities  of  life  to  the  supposed  necessi- 
ties of  law.  The  mission  of  democracy  is  to 
reverse  the  terms,  subje(5ling  the  law  to  the  uses 
of  liberty. 

XI.  It  is  not  enough  to  say  that  all  the  peo- 
ple have  an  equal  right  to  the  land  and  to  the 
elements  of  nature.  They  have  an  equal  right 
also  to  the  ideal  goods  of  the  race,  the  herediti- 
ments  of  civilization.  The  assertion  of  the 
former  right  would  in  this  day  be  of  no  avail 
without  the  assertion  of  the  latter.  Time  was 
when  the  landlord  was  the  ruler  of  the  economic 
world,  but  that  time  is  past.  That  ancient  world 
which  the  landlord  ruled  had  not  conceived  the 
idea  of  the  conquest  of  nature,  while  the  econom- 
ics of  these  times  is  motived  through  and 
through  by  that  idea.  Economic  produ<5lion  was 
once  carried  on  in  intellecflual  passivity,  but  now 

m 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

the  affirmative  intelledl  is  beginning  to  have  its 
day,  and  industry  is  becoming  a  creative  art. 
The  world-power  has  passed  from  the  hands  of 
the  landlord;  it  rests  now  in  the  hands  of  the 
capitalist.  The  world  will  no  longer  be  ruled  by 
sheer  natural  fadls;  henceforth  it  is  to  be  ruled  by 
ideas.  And  capitalism  is  a  symbol — albeit,  a  cor- 
rupt and  degraded  symbol — of  the  ideal  forces. 
Capitalism  has  appropriated  the  ideal  goods  to 
the  uses  of  the  few;  the  sovereignty  of  the  affirm- 
ative intelledl  has  been  usurped  in  the  interest  of 
a  class.  The  work  of  the  future  is  to  democratize 
the  ideal  powers  by  deepening  the  intellec5l  of  the 
controlling  class  to  its  ground  in  the  common 
human  faith,  and  by  awakening  the  passive 
spirits  of  the  people. 

The  mere  nationalization  of  the  land  would,  in 
these  days,  afford  scarcely  a  temporary  respite. 
If  the  people  were  faithless  to  democracy,  if  the 
root  of  the  matter — the  liberty,  equality,  and  fra- 
ternity— were  not  in  them.  Capitalism,  with  its 
awesome  enthronement  in  the  sovereignty  of 
states,  could  pay  all  the  rent,  support  all  the  gov- 
ernments, supply  the  masses  with  schools,  libra- 
178 


The  World  Problem 

ries,  museums,    circuses,    and  bread-doles — and 
utterly  ruin  the  world. 

XII.  The  normal  elements  of  production  are 
two:  nature  and  the  workman — the  intellec5l  of 
God  implicit  in  the  order  of  the  natural  universe 
and  the  intelled:  of  man  making  himself  at  home 
there.  The  orthodox  economists,  writing  under 
the  spell  of  the  passive  intelledl  and  in  a  social 
order  thralled  in  that  spell,  have  made  it  out  that 
the  elements  of  produdlion  are  three — to  wit, 
nature,  labor,  and  capital.  That  is  to  say,  they 
have  split  the  human  element  into  two  parts. 
As  we  have  seen,  this  was  ever  the  way  with  the 
old  regime.  Laborism  is  humanity  subjedled  to 
a  law  of  natural  necessity;  capitalism  is  the  same 
humanity  under  a  law  that  is  ideal,  but  no  less 
compulsive  and  unfree — to  wit,  a  law  of  mechan- 
ical necessity. 

The  power  of  capital  is  that  it  can  bring  a 
thousand  men  to  work  a  thousand  days  with  a 
mutual  confidence  in  one  another — based  upon 
the  power  of  the  police.  Most  of  the  wealth 
of  the  capitalist  is  not  things,  but  claims.     He 

OF  TA 

UNlVEKBiTY 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

is  not  so  much  a  curator  of  real  and  tangible 
tools  as  the  social  representative  of  a  kind  of 
meretricious  and  artificial  credit.  If  there 
should  come  into  any  community  a  genuine  and 
authentic  capitalizer  of  the  people's  credit — a 
kind  of  commercial  hero  and  master  of  materials, 
who  was  believed  in  by  the  community  and 
justified  belief — he  could  do  an  unlimited  bank- 
ing business  without  any  capital  whatever,  and 
there  would  be  no  end  of  his  power  as  a  pro- 
moter of  enterprises.  And  if  some  little  town 
on  the  verge  of  civilization  should  be  converted 
to  democracy  while  the  world  lingered — real- 
izing the  pradlical  sense  of  liberty,  equality, 
and  fraternity — it  would  become  a  commercial 
metropolis  within  a  decade  without  borrowing  a 
dollar  from  the  outside  world. 

The  talk  of  the  capitalist  as  a  necessary  saver 
and  tool-keeper  is  the  tale  of  the  infant-class  in 
economics.  It  is  not,  in  any  important  sense,  true. 
Most  of  the  world's  capital  is  renewed  every  year 
or  two.  The  simple  account  of  the  power  of  the 
capitalist  is  this :  a  highly  complicated  material 
civilization  entails  a  high  degree  of  industrial 
180 


The  World  Problem 

cooperation;  and  large  cooperations — with  their 
postponed  results — require  credit.  This  credit 
can  be  secured  in  either  of  two  ways  :  the  people 
must  believe  in  each  others'  strength  and  sanity, 
or  else  they  must  believe  in  the  power  of  a  common 
master.  There  is  no  middle  course.  The  capi- 
talist will  be  the  master  of  our  complex  modern 
society — and  he  is  not  only  inevitable,  he  is  in- 
dispensable— so  long  as  the  people's  belief  in  each 
other  is  smaller  than  the  bulk  of  their  material 
civilization.  If  the  capitalist  did  not  exist  it 
would,  as  things  stand,  be  necessary  to  invent  him. 
Cooperation  requires  credit,  and  if  the  available 
real  and  human  credit  is  not  vigorous  enough  to 
compass  the  magnitude  of  the  enterprises  that  are 
proposed,  then  it  is  necessary  to  establish  in  the 
hands  of  some  particular  person  or  persons  a  legal 
or  artificial  credit,  a  huge  accumulation  of  en- 
forcible  claims.  The  essence  of  capitalism  is  the 
reliance  of  society  upon  the  police  force  for  the 
maintenance  of  that  credit,  which  is  the  sine  qua 
non  of  social  cooperation.  The  only  possible 
remedy  for  the  tyranny  of  capitalism  consists  in 
making  our  humanity  match  the  size  of  our  civili- 
181 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

zation,  either  by  reducing  the  complexity  of  the 
latter  or  increasing  the  energy  of  the  former. 

The  socialistic  proposition  to  put  the  control  of 
industry  in  the  hands  of  public  and  political 
officers  contains  no  promise  of  substantial  melior- 
ation. For  as  things  actually  stand  the  capital- 
ists are  already  public  officers — since  their  power 
is  the  power  of  the  police. 

XIII.  In  the  long  run  trade  demands  that  the 
buyers  and  sellers  should  think  and  deal  in  the 
terms  of  a  common  law;  consequently  there  is  an 
irresistible  tendency  toward  the  unification  of 
law  within  the  circle  of  commerce.  The  only 
effe<5lual  way  of  perpetuating  the  distindlness  of 
national  codes  and  the  legal  solidarity  of  separate 
states  is  to  put  impassable  barriers  in  the  way  of 
commerce.  This  was  once  a  pradlicable  expedient; 
it  is  no  longer  so.  For  capitalism,  having  im- 
poverished the  masses  in  the  old  centers  of  com- 
merce and  exhausted  their  purchasing  capacity, 
is  compelled,  for  the  continuance  of  its  own 
power,  to  seek  foreign  markets.  And  capitalism 
is  the  power  behind  the  throne  of  all  the  sovereign 
183 


The  World  Problem 

states,  and  will  insist  upon  the  security  of  its 
investments  in  the  newly  exploited  countries. 
The  program  of  political  expansion  is  apt  to  be 
favored  also  by  the  wage-earning  classes  of  the 
ruling  nations,  since  in  general  it  offers  them  a 
temporary  respite,  shifting  the  heaviest  burdens 
of  economic  slavery  to  a  foreign  and  still  more 
helpless  proletariat.  The  effec5l  is  to  take  the 
lower  classes  temporarily — but  only  temporarily 
— into  the  capitalistic  trust  for  the  exploitation 
of  Asia,  Africa,  and  the  islands. 

The  collision  of  interest  between  the  rival 
capitalisms  of  different  nationalities  is  a  merely 
transitional  fadl.  It  would  come  to  an  end 
when  the  unappropriated  territories  had  been 
exhausted  and  the  various  spheres  of  influence 
dehmited.  After  that  the  interests  of  capital- 
ism throughout  the  world  would  be  absolutely 
solidaire.  It  is  like  the  rush  for  new  lands  in 
Oklahoma.  Every  man's  hand  was  against  his 
neighbor  until  all  the  land  was  appropriated; 
then  the  possessing  class  was  a  unit  for 
the  protection  of  all  titles  against  the  non- 
possessing. 

188 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

Upon  the  settlement  of  the  spheres  of  influence 
would  follow,  if  capitalism  were  to  have  its  way, 
the  carrying  out  of  something  like  The  Hague 
program — the  establishment  of  a  supreme  inter- 
national court,  or  sovereign  of  sovereignties, 
backed  by  irresistible  power  for  the  enforcement 
of  its  decrees.  The  court,  by  the  terms  of  its 
constitution,  would  not  be  called  upon  to  inter- 
fere in  disputes  between  the  several  great  powers 
and  their  dependencies ;  the  subjugation  of  the 
weaker  people  would  go  on  to  its  utter  conclu- 
sion. The  inauguration  of  such  a  world-state 
would  be  the  complete  triumph  of  capitalism  in 
alliance  with  the  principle  of  sovereign  authority, 
and  would  exhibit  a  full  and  perf edt  antithesis  to 
the  ideal  world-order  of  historic  Christianity 
and  democracy.  It  would  be  the  bathos  of  his- 
tory and  the  reestablishment  of  the  theocratic 
regime. 

The  hues  of  cleavage  which  now  separate 
nations  would  be  shifted  so  that  they  would 
separate  classes  by  a  gulf  wider  than  the  seas. 
There  would  follow  a  recrudescence  of  heredity 
and  caste.  An  infinite  peaceful  carnage  of  the 
184 


The  World  Problem 

poor  and  weak  would  go  on  in  the  midst  of  a  per- 
petual outpouring  of  charity.  The  Holy  Alliance 
of  governments  would  in  due  time  set  up  some 
kind  of  a  universal  ecclesiasticism  for  the  worship 
of  an  alien  and  non-human  God.  Sacramental- 
ism,  in  some  new  and  modern  garb,  would 
separate  the  officially  good  from  the  bad  by  im- 
passable walls  of  excommunication — and  phar- 
isaism  would  be  the  only  virtue.  The  university 
would  be  a  function  of  state,  and  the  only  office 
of  intelledl  would  be  to  find  reasons  for  the  status 
quo.  Dogmatism  would  prevail  with  invincible 
sway,  and  the  press  would  be  the  censored  ex- 
ponent of  the  social  code  of  plutocracy.  Art 
would  return  to  be  the  sycophant  of  the  rich,  and 
literature  would  be  mere  weariness  of  print. 
Officialdom  and  bureaucracy  would  offer  the  only 
career  for  talent.  There  would  be  nowhere 
between  the  poles  an  individual ;  the  mob  would 
possess  the  earth  and  the  spirit  of  the  race  would 
be  broken. 

XIV.  But  this  is  all  an  imagination.     Thus 
and  so  it  would  be  if  revolutions  could  go  back- 
185 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

ward;  but  they  can  not.  It  is  impossible  to 
reestablish  the  ancient  regime.  The  perfecfl  plan 
of  capitalism  and  universal  state  sovereignty  is 
bound  to  fail.  The  real  issue  lies  between 
democracy  and  chaos.  The  people  en  masse  can 
not  be  got  to  believe  in  theocratic  religion;  there- 
fore the  theocratic  social  order  is  out  of  the 
question.  The  people  will  go  on,  through  the 
mist  and  confusion,  to  believe  in  the  religion  of 
democracy,  or  else  they  will  believe  in  nothing  at 
all,  and  society  itself  will  become  impossible. 
For  there  is  no  society  without  a  common  faith. 
Our  real  and  prac5licable  choice  lies  between 
endless  class  collisions  and  insurredlions,  accom- 
plishing only  terror  and  misery,  and  on  the  other 
hand  the  universal  prevalence  of  a  Democratic 
Catholicism,  maintaining  a  world-wide  commerce 
and  a  frankly  human  common  law. 

XV.  The  use  of  studying  international  politics 
is  to  discover  their  futility.  The  international 
issues  are  simply  a  blind  to  the  real  issues.  The 
haute  politique  is  a  narrow  provincialism;  the 
catholic  and  cosmopolitan  issues  are  local.  It 
186 


The  World  Problem 

makes  no  considerable  difference  to  anybody,  not 
even  to  the  little  knots  of  capitalists  whose  bank- 
accounts  are  concerned,  and  certainly  not  to  any- 
body else,  how  the  territorial  lines  shall  be  drawn 
and  the  maps  colored. 

The  real  issues  upon  which  the  fate  of  the  world 
is  turning  are  to  be  encountered  in  their  complete 
alignment  in  any  county  or  township.  The  real 
question  is  a  social  question;  and  the  social 
question  is  at  bottom  simply  the  choice  between 
theocratic  and  democratic  religion,  with  the 
fearful  proviso  that  if  the  moving  spirits  eledl 
theocracy  they  will  be  reckoning  without  the 
people.  The  people  will  not — can  not  if  they 
would — accept  such  leading.  And  such  a  choice 
would  commit  the  world  to  a  welter  of  confusion 
such  as  would  make  the  Dark  Ages  seem  radiant 
with  Hght.  There  is  only  one  avenue  of  promise, 
and  that  lies  straight  ahead  along  the  great 
historic  highway  of  evolutionary  democracy .  We 
have  arrived  at  a  point  in  the  road  where  the 
integrity  of  society  can  no  longer  be  maintained 
on  theocratic  and  authoritative  principles.  Mean- 
while society  has  been  leavened  through  and 
187 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

through  with  a  latent  and  potential  democracy. 
The  transition  to  the  new  regime  can  be  accom- 
plished in  peace  and  order  like  the  mighty 
mystery  and  cataclasm  of  natural  birth;  but  if 
the  process  is  opposed  and  prevented  there  will 
be  an  agony  of  travail. 

XVI.  This  is  not  a  world  of  mockery;  the 
impossible  is  never  necessary.  Social  order  has 
become  impossible  on  the  old  plan;  it  must  then 
be  possible  on  the  new  plan.  It  must  be  possible 
now  after  these  ages  of  preparation — and  here  in 
the  country  which  is  most  democratic  of  all — to 
break  the  spell  of  sedl  and  party,  and  to  accom- 
plish such  an  association  of  the  people  as  shall 
suffice  for  the  maintenance  of  a  democratic  code 
of  law — a  law  disclaiming  all  pretence  of  state 
sovereignty  or  transcendent  authority,  resting 
frankly  upon  the  general  reasonableness  of  men, 
and  having  only  such  validity  as  is  conferred 
upon  it  by  private  persons  at  the  cheerful  risk  of 
their  own,  not  others',  lives.  The  distinguishing 
mark  of  such  a  legal  system — a  mark  which  is 
the  seal  and  substance  of  our  American  charter 
188 


The  World  Problem 

of  independence — is  that,  not  the  law  itself,  but 
the  common  liberty  and  equality  of  the  people,  is 
conceived  of  as  the  primary  social  fadl.  It  is 
nothing  that  men  of  all  conditions  should  be 
assured  that  the  definitions  of  the  law  will  be 
applied  without  respedl  of  persons.  We  have 
never  had  that  assurance  indeed;  but  if  we  had 
it,  it  would  not  of  itself  save  us  from  the  most 
ruthless  oppression  of  the  weak.  The  point  is 
that  democratic  jurisprudence  is  utterly  careless  of 
all  rights  except  such  as  avail  for  the  defense  of 
the  common  right  to  life  and  liberty.  The 
equality  of  the  people  is,  as  has  been  shown,  not  an 
equality  under  the  law,  but  above  the  law;  the  law 
is  simply  its  instrument.  Of  course,  such  a  prin- 
ciple as  this  is  foolishness,  and  a  stumbling-block 
to  all  sectarians  and  partisans.  It  is  the  hardest 
saying  in  all  Holy  Scripture,  but  the  secret  heart 
of  the  world  is  set  upon  it  and  the  momentum  of 
history  is  behind  it.  The  last  man  in  the  vine- 
yard is  as  good  as  the  first. 

Now,  the  pradlicability  of  establishing  a  govern- 
ment whose  sovereignty  shall  exist  simply  in  the 
consentaneous  wills  of  the  people,  depends  upon 
189 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

the  cordial  rejedlion  of  the  old  legal  principle  of 
deserts,  and  the  acceptance  of  the  principle  of 
supra-legal  equality.  If  a  controlling  element 
of  the  people  in  the  United  States  are  not  ready 
for  this,  then  we  must  fail  to  meet  the  crisis  of 
the  world.  The  program  of  democratic  Catholi- 
cism becomes  for  us  impradlicable,  and  we  must 
die  in  the  ruins  of  the  old  regime. 

The  history  of  the  world  turns  upon  the  ques- 
tion whether  the  stronger  spirits  in  the  United 
States — now  in  the  beginning  of  the  twentieth 
century  of  the  Christian  era — will  understand 
and  pradlically  approve  the  story  of  the  Prodigal 
Son,  in  its  assertion  of  the  indefeasible  equality 
of  all  persons  and  its  negation  of  the  old  world- 
principle  of  privilege  and  deserts. 

XVII.  As  order  is  the  essence  of  intellect, 
social  order  is  an  intelle<5lual  affair.  Civilization 
can  not  be  built  on  amiable  sentiments.  The 
principles  of  liberty,  equality,  and  fraternity  can 
never  adluate  a  social  order  until  they  are  appre- 
hended as  axioms  of  the  intelledl.  They  must 
be  seen  to  be  the  more  or  less  conscious  assump- 
190 


The  World  Problem 

tions  of  all  valid  intelledlual  processes — tlie  roots 
of  the  common  sense  of  men.  The  opening  of 
the  new  era  is  to  be  signalized  by  the  bringing 
to  high  and  deliberate  consciousness  of  those 
primary  intellectual  and  moral  assumptions  with- 
out which  the  old  regime  itself  would  have  been 
unlivable  and  would  have  unpeopled  the  planet. 

The  evangel  of  democracy  is  the  open  discovery 
and  announcement  that  the  principles  of  liberty, 
equality,  and  fraternity  are  the  indispensable 
basis  of  all  valid  science  and  civilizing  art — yes, 
the  basis  of  sanity  itself.  The  gradual  rise  of 
the  affirmative  intelledl,  with  its  assertion  of  the 
great  historic  creeds  of  Christianity  and  democ- 
racy, is  the  long  gray  dawn  of  the  world's  health. 

The  elan  of  all  creative  life  is  the  prepossession 
that  there  is  an  Intellec5l  back  of  nature,  and  that 
this  Intelle(5l  is,  in  its  inner  law,  congruous  with 
the  intellec5l  of  common  humanity — is,  in  a  word, 
itself  human.  If  this  prepossession  is  false,  then 
science  and  art  are  both  alike  impossible.  For  a 
man  can  not  know  and  work  in  a  world  that  is 
founded  on  non-human  principles. 

Democracy  begins,  therefore,  with  the  axiom 
191 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

of  the  Incarnation — the  dodlrine  of  the  humanity 
of  God.  It  lays  that  stone  as  the  comer-stone 
of  the  civilization  of  the  world.  And  it  writes 
on  the  pediment  of  its  pro-cathedral  :  I^iberty, 
Equality,  and  Fraternity — I^iberty,  because  it  is 
in  the  individual  and  not  in  any  corporate  state 
that  the  consciousness  exists  that  can  understand 
the  consciousness  of  God;  Equality,  because  priv- 
ilege is  the  creature  of  corporations,  and  no  man 
standing  alone  with  God  can  deny  the  equal 
humanity  of  other  men;  Fraternity,  because  the 
consentaneousness  of  human  wills  and  the 
issuance  therefrom  of  a  congenial  and  catholic 
law  is  the  foregone  conclusion  of  common 
sanity, 

tf-^  XVIII.  Democracy  submits  to  majorities,  not 
/  because  majorities  are  right,  but  because  it  has 
I  faith  in  the  final  common  sense  of  men,  and 
I  loves  beauty  and  order  more  than  victory  or 
I  martyrdom.  It  hates  the  fanaticism  of  little 
I  crowds  as  much  as  that  of  large  ones — more, 
*'  indeed;  for  if  the  salt  of  the  earth  shall  lose  its 
savor  the  world  will  rot. 
192 


The  World  Problem 

A  democratic  man  fights  not  for  sovereignties 
and  fine  sentiments,  but  only  for  the  concrete 
things — the  human  and  personal  chivalries  that 
a  man  standing  alone  might  fight  for.  *«--***1 

The  English-speaking  race  to-day  in  the  Philip-  j 

pine  Islands  and  in  South  Africa  is  in  contact  j 

with  two  weaker  races.      In  the  nature  of  things  j 

it  is  bound  to  adjust  its  relations  to  these  people  I 

in  such  a  manner  as  will  tend  toward  the  unifi-  I 

cation  of  law.     This  end  could  easily  have  been         / 
attained  if  the  parties  concerned  had  had  a  work-         / 
ing  belief  in  the  principle  of  the  sovereignty  of        / 
the  people.     The  one  thing  that  has  stood  in  the      / 
way  of  a  peaceful  adjustment  of  relations  has 
been  the  common  obsession  of  the  sovereignty 
governments.     The  conception  on  every  side  has 
been  that  the  law  flows  down  out  of  some  high 
fountain  of  authority  instead  of  rising  up  out  of 
the  wills  of  the  people.     The  question  of  estab- 
lishing a  common  law  has  therefore  been  posed 
in  a  juristic,  abstra<5l,  and  transcendental  way. 
Men  have  not  dealt  with  men,  but  politicians  with 
politicians.     The  question  proposed  has  not  been, 
How  can  we  best  achieve  the  practical  interests 
193 


tie       / 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

of  civilization,  protect  life  and  property,  and 
release  the  creative  energies  of  the  people  ?  but, 
Where  shall  we  set  the  throne  of  transcendental 
authority  ? 

The  Filipinos  and  the  Boers  have  fought  for 
two  small  sovereignties  ;  we  of  the  northern  lands 
have  spent  our  blood  and  money  for  two  larger 
ghosts.  But  all  alike  have  fought  for  phantoms 
and  are  bound  to  lose.  The  rising  tide  of  democ- 
racy will  sweep  away  all  sovereignties  of  state. 

The  democratic  spirit  has  not  indeed  come  yet 
to  its  clear  utterance,  but  the  day  of  that  pro- 
nouncement is  at  hand  and  events  are  shaping 
its  words.  Democracy  comes  to  itself  by  con- 
fronting its  contradidlions.  The  denial  of  the 
principles  of  the  world-republic  is  necessary  to 
their  convincing  aflSrmation. 

These  principles,    expressed  in  the  terms  of 

politics,  are  Universal  Law  and  Decentralization. 

i  In  terms  of  Christianity   they  are  Catholicism 

i 

and  Conscience. 
^-      The  pradlical  program  of  democracy  is,  on  the 
one  hand,  submission  to  the  majority  in  all  the 
dogmas  and  futile  forms  of  politics,   and,   on 
194 


/i 


The  World  Problem 

the  other  hand,  the  world-wide  association  of 
sensible  men  in  truceless  warfare  against  the 
money-power  and  the  mob,  for  real  liberty  and 
the  solid  things  of  civilization. 

XIX.  The  mark  of  the  world-movement  now 
in  progress  is  its  sublime  materialism.  It  would 
win  heaven  by  its  humility  and  earth-grip.  That 
is  the  genius  of  Christianity  and  democracy.  The 
awakened  intellec5l  can  not  interest  itself  in 
purely  ethical  problems.  The  preaching  of  ab- 
stradl  righteousness  to  a  generation  that  is  gird- 
ing itself  with  joy  for  the  work  of  world-making 
is  as  idle  as  the  whistling  of  the  wind. 

The  philosophy  of  democracy  is  the  negation 
of  all  mere  philosophy;  its  use  is  to  break  the 
ancient  spell  of  mental  abstradlion  and  to  deliver 
the  soul  to  enterprise.  The  Truth  for  which  the 
raptured  sages  have  striven — what  is  it  ?  It  does 
not  exist.  The  only  Truth  that  the  new  age 
knows  is  pradlicable  Fadl.  To  make  the  soul  at 
home  here  is  the  sum  of  its  philosophy.  Its 
sacrifice  is  civilization,  and  it  has  nothing  else 
to  do. 

lOS 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

The  final  judgment  upon  the  old  order  that  is 
passing  away  is  that  it  has  not  known  how  to  build 
a  city  or  condudl  the  commerce  of  the  world.  It 
has  been  full  of  futility  and  words,  has  talked 
interminably  of  rights  and  duties,  and  devastated 
the  gardens  of  the  earth.  It  has  dreamed  of 
gorgeous  empires  and  smothered  the  creative 
spirit  of  mankind.  The  tools  of  the  Titans  have 
been  put  into  its  hands,  and  it  has  turned  the 
edge  of  every  one  of  them.  Its  stupendous 
machineries  have  made  grist  of  its  own  flesh.  The 
ban  upon  it  is  incompetency. 

The  old  regime  has  scared  itself  to  death  with 
the  ghosts  of  its  own  imagination.  The  Nine- 
teenth Century  was  frightened  out  of  its  faith  by 
the  discovery  of  the  size  of  the  cosmos.  It 
made  a  fetish  of  capital,  and  cringed  to  cor- 
porations because  it  was  afraid  of  the  elemental 
fadls.  In  its  hurry  to  be  safe  it  had  no  time  to 
be  civil,  and  it  forgot  the  fine  arts.  It  ran 
to  the  state  for  patronage  and  protec5lion  as 
timid  children  huddle  under  their  mother's 
skirt.  Its  Great  Powers  fought  no  battles — 
except  against  the  weak.  They  sapped  their 
196 


The  World  Problem 

strength  in  building  armaments  as  a  monument 
to  their  fears. 

But  now,  out  of  the  welter  of  cowardice  and 
ineptitude,  a  new  day  breaks  in  repentance,  to 
affirm  the  existence  of  the  soul  and  the  pradli- 
cability  of  civilization.  The  business  of  these 
times  and  the  special  mission  of  the  American 
spirit  is  to  set  free  the  creative  energies  of  the 
people,  to  girdle  the  earth  with  splendid  and 
cosmopolitan  cities,  and  to  express,  in  the  eter- 
nal, fluent  forms  of  art,  the  infinite  romance  of 
humanity. 

XX.  Will  the  University  spring  up  out  of  the 
common  ground  as  if  it  were  a  new  creation,  and 
destitute  of  a  great  tradition  ?  Yes,  if  necessary. 
Nothing  can  prevent  its  rise — no  bHndness  or  ob- 
stinacy of  those  that  stand  in  the  way.  The 
stream  of  history  may  be  driven  into  subterranean 
courses,  like  the  great  rivers  of  the  arid  West, 
but  we  are  bound  to  believe  that,  in  spite  of  all 
obstrudlions,  it  will  come  to  the  surface  again. 
There  can  be  no  hiatus  in  a  stream. 

There  is,  however,  an  open  and  obvious  chap- 
197 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

nel  between  the  old  Catholicism  of  dogma  and 
that  democratic  Catholicism  toward  which  we  are 
pressing.  And,  strange  as  it  may  seem  to  those 
that  have  not  pondered  the  matter,  that  channel 
is  the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church  of  the  United 
States.  Here  is  the  line  of  least  resistance  be- 
tween the  greatness  of  the  old  regime  and  the 
greatness  of  the  new.  If  the  current  of  history 
shall  eventually  take  some  other  line — which  is 
quite  possible — it  will  be  because  the  repre- 
sentatives of  the  historic  church  tradition  in 
this  country  have  successfully  opposed  their 
provincial  conceits  to  the  logic  of  their  moral 
destiny. 

Anglican  churchmanship  in  America  is  insig- 
nificant in  numbers,  but  an  umbilical  cord  is  not 
a  thing  of  bulk.  And  the  proper  business  of 
protestant  episcopalianism  is  just  to  wither  and 
be  buried  out  of  sight  in  giving  life  and  birth  to 
democratic  Catholicism — the  flesh  and  blood  of 
the  University.  The  sedl  must  sow  itself  as  the 
seed  of  the  Church. 

This  protestant  episcopalianism — confused,  in- 
articulate, half-conscious  as  it  is — is  big  with 
198 


The  World  Problem 

potentialities.  It  can  not  be  said,  perhaps,  that 
it  has  a  great  idea,  but  it  is  a  great  idea.  It  is 
the  only  extant  thing  in  Christendom  that  is  ob- 
viously driving  toward  Catholicism  by  the  free 
highway  of  intelledl.  Universality,  through  in- 
dividuality ;  law  and  order,  through  sheer  gains 
of  liberty — this  is  of  the  very  genius  of  the  United 
States.  It  is  no  European  importation,  but  was 
bom  on  this  soil. 

The  signs  of  this  development  have  not  been 
sufi&ciently  noted.  They  are  obvious  enough. 
The  unquestioned  existence  within  the  Episcopal 
Church  of  contradi(5lory  schools  of  speculative 
thinking,  representative  of  about  every  possible 
view  of  theological  things,  is  a  sufficient  adver- 
tisement to  the  world  that  this  organization  can 
not  rest  for  long  on  any  sort  of  dogmatic  basis. 
It  must,  in  the  near  future,  either  be  torn  to 
fragments  by  the  irreconcilable  theories  of 
warring  facflions,  or  else  must  awake  to  a 
clear  consciousness  of  its  adlual  state,  and 
frankly  offer  the  unique  spectacle  of  a  thorough- 
going protesantism — the  first  church  in  history 
to  respedl  the  right  of  private  judgment  and 
199 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

build  a  social  strudlure  on  a  basis  of  intelledlual 
liberty. 

That  this  Church  is  bound  by  the  very  nature 
of  its  constitution  either  to  be  the  Mother  of 
the  University  or  else  to  die  barren  is  evident 
from  another  point  of  view.  It  follows  from  its 
historical  attempt  to  associate  the  protestant  prin- 
cipal of  private  judgment  with  the  catholic  prin- 
ciple of  territorial  jurisdidlion.  This  principle  of 
territorial  jurisdi(5lion  means,  if  it  means  any- 
thing, that  not  merely  the  people  who  agree  with 
each  other,  but  all  the  people — whether  they  know 
it  or  not,  and  whether  they  like  it  or  not — are  in 
some  real  sense  within  the  pale  of  the  Church. 
Now,  if  the  Church  takes  all  the  people  of  the 
community  into  account,  the  only  way  that  it 
can  establish  an  intellectually  restridlive  dogma 
is  the  Roman  Catholic  way.  It  must  be  main- 
tained that  the  intelledl  is  nil  so  far  as  the  subjedt- 
matter  of  the  dogma  in  question  is  concerned — 
that  the  natural  mind  has  no  competency  for  that 
kind  of  truth.  Then,  if  one  of  the  Church's 
teachers  changes  his  mind  he  can  be  consistently 
and  logically  banned  and  put  down.  For  to 
200 


The  World  Problem 

change  one's  mind  about  matters  that  private 
judgment  has  no  right  to  deal  with  is  indubi- 
tably wicked. 

But  a  church  that  gives  any  sort  of  counte- 
nance to  the  protestant  principle  must,  if  it  would 
establish  a  general  dogmatic  agreement  among 
its  members,  give  up  the  claim  of  territorial 
jurisdi(5lion.  It  must  become  simply  a  company 
of  people  that  think  alike.  In  that  case,  if  the 
preacher  becomes  heterodox  it  is  logical  that  he 
should  be  put  out  of  the  society.  He  can  go 
elsewhere. 

Thus  Rome  and  the  run  of  the  protestant  se(5ls 
are  involved  in  no  self-contradic5lion  in  their  sev- 
eral methods  of  maintaining  dogmatic  unity. 
But  the  case  is  different  with  the  Protestant 
Episcopal  Church.  This  Church,  in  its  attempt 
at  dogmatic  unity,  is  involved  in  a  logical 
absurdity — a  prac5lical  impossibility.  When  its 
authorized  teacher  changes  his  mind,  this  Church 
cannot  say,  as  the  Roman  Church  does:  "You 
are  wicked  and  an  apostate ;  be  silent,  the  peo- 
ple shall  stop  their  ears  if  you  speak!"  The 
Protestant  Episcopal  Church  cannot  say  this, 
201 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

because  it  is  protestant,  and  Protestants  must 
change  their  minds  once  in  a  way — it  is  even 
their  duty.  Neither  can  the  Episcopal  Church 
do  as  the  protestant  sedls  do  ;  it  can  not  say  to 
its  prophet  of  the  strange  vision :  '  *  You  have 
ceased  to  be  one  of  us ;  go  outside  into  the 
world!  "  It  can  not  say  this  because  it  claims 
territorial  jurisdiction,  and  refuses  to  admit  the 
existence  of  an  outside  world.  Its  heretics  must 
I  therefore  stay  within  its  pale,  and  that  too  with- 
out moral  stigma.  To  sum  up  the  case  in  a 
word,  this  Church,  being  protestant,  cannot  put 
its  heretics  down  ;  and,  being  catholic,  it  cannot 
put  them  out.  The  situation  is  certainly  fatal  to 
orthodoxy. 

In  this  extraordinary  dilemma,  unexampled 
hitherto  in  the  Christian  ages,  it  is  possible  for 
the  American  Episcopal  Church  to  give  up  its 
claim  of  territorial  jurisdi(5lion  and  confess  itself 
one  of  the  catalog  of  protestant  sedls,  or  it  is 
possible  for  it  to  give  up  its  protestantism  and 
confess  itself  a  scion  of  Rome  ;  but  it  cannot  go 
on  for  twenty  years  more  along  the  lines  on 
which  it  is  now  moving,  without  emerging  into 
202 


The  World  Problem 

a  new  era  as  the  open  champion  of  intelledlual 
liberty  committed  to  the  organization  of  Amer- 
ican society  on  a  basis  of  undogmatic  faith. 

The  hegemony  of  the  historic  Church  of  our 
race  would  then  pass  from  Canterbury  and  York 
to  New  York  and  San  Francisco,  The  Anglican 
Church,  democratized  and  extending  the  organic 
filaments  of  an  international  social  order 
throughout  the  English-speaking  world,  would 
not  fail  to  give  expression  to  the  university  ideal 
— effacing  the  hard  lines  of  race  and  class,  and 
reducing  all  political  and  economic  corporations 
to  a  utilitarian  basis.  It  would  be  seen  that 
the  cause  of  intellecSlual  liberty  is  not  of  mere 
academic  interest,  but  the  burden  and  passion  of 
Christianity ;  that  it  means  the  defeat  of  eco- 
nomic and  political  tyranny,  and  the  release  of 
the  creative  faculties  of  mankind. 

The  Church,  in  becoming  the  open  champion 
of  intelle<5lual  liberty,  must  pass  through  a  mo- 
mentous revolution.  For  so  long  as  the  Church 
puts  the  lightest  fetter  upon  the  intelledl,  it  is  it- 
self a  monopoly  and  the  chief  of  monopolies — the 
bulwark  of  the  old  regime.  But  as  it  passes — 
203 


The  Affirmative  Intellect 

through  the  long  processes  of  historic  evolution 
— out  into  the  open  air  of  intellec5lual  liberty,  the 
Church  becomes  the  destroyer  of  monopolies — 
the  Presence  and  Power  of  the  sovereignty  of  the 
people. 


THB  BND 


304 


THIS  BOOK  IS  DUE  ON  THE  LAST  DATE 
STAMPED  BELOW 

AN  INITIAL  PINE  OF  25  CENTS 

WILL  BE  ASSESSED   FOR   FAILURE  TO   RETURN 
THIS   BOOK  ON   THE   DATE   DUE.    THE   PENALTY 
WILL  INCREASE  TO  SO  CENTS  ON  THE  FOURTH 
DAY    AND    TO     $1.00    ON    THE    SEVENTH     DAY 
OVERDUE. 

FEB  5  1942S 

'4-;.      . 

..-<• 

22fe5K9r 

WAP  1  0  inr  f    i     , 

lfif-\l\   1  \J  jy^jK    ;      ! 

^\un'59"flB 

'•  <  V   ,■« 

'■■ '  ■)  ■' 

LD21-100m-7,'40  (6936s) 

YB   12712 


